A Mountain Springs Christmas

Chapter 10

ten

JACK

The entire day, Jack had been thinking about how he’d almost kissed Noelle last night. A part of him wished they had kissed—he so wanted to. He had wanted to for the past couple of weeks. For the last year and a half, actually.

But a more significant part of him was terrified that he’d come so close to very nearly kissing her. She was his employee. He was her boss. Kissing Noelle wasn’t on the table.

Since it was a Saturday and he wasn’t hurrying to get off work, he told Noelle that he would pick Aiden up for the Santa Hat thing because he wanted to check on Rachel. When he walked into their house, though, Aiden didn’t come running to leap onto him to give him a hug.

Rachel poked her head out from the back of the house and held a finger to her lips, motioning for him to be quiet. As he got closer, she whispered, “Between the hayride last night and sledding this afternoon with Quinton’s family, he was tuckered out. We just ate, and he fell asleep at the table just a few minutes ago. I’m sorry I didn’t realize how tired he was before you drove all the way here.”

“It’s no problem.” He walked into the kitchen and saw his little nephew slumped back into his chair, soundly asleep. He was glad he came; he would’ve hated for Rachel to have had to try to carry him into his room. She might have been doing better the past few days, but something like that would’ve been too much.

He scooped Aiden into his arms and carried him to his room, placing him on his bed and pulling the covers up to his shoulders. Then he gave his hair a ruffle and stepped out of his room, carefully pulling the door closed behind him.

He was surprised at how disappointed he was that they wouldn’t be going to the activity with Noelle’s family. He was actually starting to really like those celebrations so much more than he thought he ever could.

He looked around Rachel’s kitchen and family room area. “Since I’m here, what do you need help with? I can clean or do dishes...”

Rachel shook her head. “No. I’m pretty tuckered. Since Aiden is asleep this early, I’d like the chance to go to sleep this early, too.” She paused. “But you should still go to the activity.”

He should. He told Noelle he would be there, and he didn’t want to let her down. And he had agreed to the exposure therapy thing. But they had also very nearly kissed last night. He had been so successful at keeping things professional with her for so long, and last night, he came so close to completely failing. Could he even trust himself to be with her more?

“You told her you would go,” Rachel said in a stern voice. “You should keep your word.”

Rachel knew him well enough to know exactly what to say to get him to go. He really didn’t want to go back on his word. The part of him that had wished he had just kissed her last night celebrated.

The other part was going to have to be on high alert.

When he arrived at Noelle’s parents’ house, Noelle seemed genuinely sad that Aiden couldn’t come. The two of them appeared to have bonded more strongly than he would’ve guessed.

“Okay,” Noelle’s dad said, holding a Santa hat by the white fur trim and shaking its contents, “we’ve got six teams and six papers inside. Two for the dinner, two for the entertainment, and two for the decorations. Are you all ready for this?”

Everyone cheered, and Jack looked around. Noelle and her four sisters were each standing with their spouses—a date for Katie—and had their kids with them. It seemed that each sister was a team with her own family, so the sixth team must be her parents and Captain, who was sitting upright at their feet, clearly thinking he was on the team to beat. Jack was glad he hadn’t skipped coming—it would’ve left Noelle in a team by herself.

Noelle rubbed her hands together, eyes on the Santa hat, seeming full of anticipation at what they would draw out. It made him smile. Her dad took the hat to Hope, and she drew out a paper and then said out loud, “Dinner.”

“Let’s hope that Katie doesn’t get the other ‘Dinner’ paper,” Noelle said, apparently kicking off the smack-talk portion of the evening.

“Hey, I heard that,” Katie said. Then, after a pause, she added, “But really, even I’m hoping for that.”

Noelle leaned in close to him, and he tried to ignore the way it kicked his heart rate up a notch. “If we get dinner, we have thirty minutes from the time we leave the house to the time we get back to shop for food. We’ll have twenty dollars, and we’ll have to buy ingredients that the other team will use to make a meal. The challenge is to buy things that in no way will go together. We’d have thirty minutes to cook once we get back.”

His eyebrows rose. “Let’s hope we don’t get that one, then.”

Her dad took the hat to Becca next, and she drew out one and said, “Entertainment!” and her three older kids pumped their fists.

He leaned in and whispered, “What’s that one?”

She kept her eyes on the Santa hat but whispered, “Each team will have fifteen minutes to gather props and costumes from anywhere in the house. Then they give what they collected to the other team. Then each team has forty-five minutes to come up with a skit using those props and costumes and practice it.”

Wow. Her family really did the high-pressure activities here. He felt completely out of his league.

Then her dad brought the hat to Noelle, and she drew out a paper. “Yes! We got decorations!”

She was so excited that it made him smile.

She leaned in and said, “Okay, they’ll have a list of things we need to get, and we’ll have forty-five minutes to get them. Then, when we get back, we’ll have fifteen minutes to decorate a small tree with what we collected.”

That didn’t seem too hard. He could do this.

Katie and her date drew out the other “Skit” paper; Julianne, her husband, and her two kids were going to decorate the second tree; and Noelle’s parents drew the other “Dinner” paper.

“Okay,” her mom called out, “you’ve got five minutes to huddle and come up with a game plan. When you hear the horn, your timer for the games starts!”

Noelle grabbed one of the papers her dad held out, then grabbed Jack’s hand and pulled him into the living room that was right next to the front door as the rest of the family scattered to different locations. A tree that was probably two and a half or three feet high and already had lights on it sat on a table in the middle of the room.

She put her hand on it. “Our challenge is basically a scavenger hunt for items to decorate this tree. We have to get something that fits each of the items on this list. The more creative, the better, since everyone votes on which team wins.”

“What’s at stake?”

“Bragging rights and a trophy. Whoever wins it keeps it for a year and proudly displays it. The next year, they have to give it up to whoever won that category. And Jack? We really want to win.”

He smiled, loving this competitive side of her. He glanced at the list of five items. “We can probably go to that craft store on Main Street and get all of this.”

She shook her head. “We can’t get more than one thing at any one place, and we can’t spend more than ten dollars total. So it has to mostly be things that are free or that we can ask someone for.” She gestured to a little table. “We have a hot glue gun, scissors, tape, markers, um, it looks like a couple of hole punches—one a circle and one a square—but we don’t have time to get too crafty. We need to keep it simple. And come up with a theme.”

Okay, maybe they didn’t get the easy one. He was definitely out of his league.

Noelle tapped a finger on the list. “Something edible... What kind of food would make a good decoration? Gumdrops are too small... Oh! I saw holiday pretzels at the convenience store just right out on Center. They were shaped like stars. Maybe we can do a theme around that.”

Jack nodded. Okay, some direction. He had no idea what to do with the direction, but it sounded good.

“Something sparkly or shiny... Hmm. And something red or blue. That one’s easy enough—we could always get a roll of ribbon at the craft store to glue to the back of the pretzels to hang them with. Then we need something found outside and some kind of garland.”

Yep. Totally out of his depth.

And then an idea hit. “Something outside—I saw a giant pine tree two houses up. I bet there are pine cones under it still. Maybe we could get some for decorations or...Oh. Maybe if we get five"—he grabbed the markers and laid them out on the table like he was making a big asterisk—"we could put them like this and glue the inside right here to make a star.”

“That’s genius!” Noelle said, grabbing his arm and making him feel pretty proud of himself for thinking of it.

“Now we just need something sparkly or shiny and some kind of garland. What goes with stars? We can’t just have the entire tree be stars. Planets? No. Moons? No.” She shook her hands out. “I can’t think of anything that goes with stars. What else is in the sky?”

As soon as she said that, all he could think of was helping Aiden to hang all the snowflakes he’d made from the ceiling of their family room. “How about ‘Snow under the Stars’ for the theme? Maybe we can cut out snowflakes.”

“Ooo,” she said. “I like that. Okay, we need something sparkly or shiny. I know that the craft store has sheets of paper that are a shiny silver. Maybe we can make the snowflakes out of that. It’s thicker paper, so we won’t be able to be too intricate with them, but I think we can make it work.”

“That’s two things from the craft store, though.”

“Sixty seconds!” Noelle’s mom called out from somewhere else in the house.

“Eek! You’re right. We’ve got to move fast. Um... Oh! The woman who lives on the corner makes handmade cards. She’s bound to have ribbon—let’s ask her. What are we going to do for a garland?”

“Maybe something with the snow theme? Like tissues or something?” It sounded stupid, but it was the only idea he had.

“Oh! Tissue paper. We could get white—it’s everywhere and super cheap. There’s an antique store next to the craft store, and they use it to wrap up breakable trinkets. We could try there. We could cut the sheets like big snowflakes and then, I don’t know, tape them together into a long garland and then bunch it with ribbon.”

A loud horn sounded.

“Huddle time is up!” Noelle’s mom called out. “You have sixty minutes from right now to be back here to present what your team has come up with!”

Noelle grinned at him, her eyes lit with excitement. It was coming so strongly off her that he was feeling it himself. “Are you ready?”

He nodded and grinned back. They both slipped on their coats, then she grabbed his hand and pulled him outside. They raced to the neighbor with the pine tree first, knocked on the door, got permission to take “as many pinecones as you’d like—feel free to take them all!” and grabbed seven, just in case. Then they ran just as quickly to the house on the corner.

A woman who was probably in her seventies answered the door, and when Noelle explained what they were doing, she said, “Of course, dear! Come into my craft room. No, don’t take off your shoes—you’ve got a race to win!”

In less than two minutes, they had a roll of ice blue ribbon in their hands, and they were racing back to where his car was parked. He dumped the pine cones onto the floor behind his seat, then they got into the car, and he headed toward the convenience store.

Luckily, they had the pretzels in stock. Noelle picked up two big bags of them and put them on the counter.

Jack’s eyebrows drew together. “Why two?”

“Because Aiden is going to wake up tomorrow morning and realize he slept right through this activity, and he’s going to feel bad. I figured I could take a bag over to him tomorrow and hang out with him for a bit so he won’t feel like he missed so much.”

Jack just stared at Noelle. They were in the middle of a race against the clock, trying to win a prize that seemed really important to her, and she was stopping to think of someone who was vastly important to him? It touched him in a way that left him speechless.

She put her credit card back in her pocket, grabbed the bag from the cashier, and said, “Come on!” and they both raced out of the store.

When they were in the car and driving toward the craft store, he asked, “So who would you be on a team with if Aiden and I weren’t coming this year?” He came so close to not attending this once he found out that Aiden wasn’t.

She was quiet for a long moment before she answered. Then she cleared her throat and said, “I don’t know. But it kind of requires six teams. This event has evolved over the years—before everyone started getting married and having kids, we used to do it with cousins, aunts, and uncles. Their families have grown, too, so they do their own versions of it now. For as long as I can remember, Gran-gran had always been my teammate. We didn’t do it last year since we were planning a funeral, so this was the first year without her.”

He felt an acute pain from what had almost happened. What if he’d just stayed at Rachel’s and helped out around her house and not come at all? He felt sick just thinking of how it would be for her to face this first event without her gran-gran and have to do it without a teammate.

He could feel the emotions coming from her as she, too, likely thought about what the night would’ve been like if he hadn’t come. Maybe if he and Aiden had never planned to come, she would’ve asked one of her cousins or a friend to join her. He was glad it was him here, though.

“What was your favorite time when you pulled Decorations from Santa’s hat?”

She chuckled at whatever had just come to her mind, and he was glad it was a happy memory. “One year, Gran-gran and I decided to do a ‘snow globe’ theme. We got these little balloons that were see-through and poured some glitter inside, and then pushed in little random objects we found outside before blowing them up. We had thought it was the most genius idea ever until we put them on the tree and a good half of the balloons popped when they made contact with the pine needles. We were both laughing so hard, I don’t think we even finished decorating it before the horn sounded.”

Her story made him smile. Their lives growing up were so different from each other. He was glad she had memories like that.

“I’m worried that we aren’t going to finish everything,” Noelle said. “It’s going to take a while to cut out all the snowflakes and glue ribbons to all the ornaments, so we need to get back as quickly as we can. I know where the paper is at The Crafty One. Do you want to run into Trove of Oldies and ask for the tissue paper at the same time?”

He said yes just as he turned into a parking spot, coming to a stop way too quickly, and they both jumped out of his car and ran into their stores. There must not have been too many people in line at The Crafty One because she actually beat him back out to the car. The woman at the Trove of Oldies register had wanted to hear all about the scavenger hunt, but still, it hadn’t taken too long.

Then they drove back to Noelle’s parents’ house. The whole time they were in the car, he tried to think back to the last time when he’d done anything as fun as this and was coming up blank. Surely a race to gather supplies wasn’t the highlight of his life.

He glanced over to where Noelle sat with such an intense look of determination on her face. Maybe it was less about what he was doing and more about who he was doing it with.

They parked, grabbed the supplies, and headed into the house. After they dumped all the supplies on the craft table, Noelle pulled out her phone. “Thirty-two minutes! I think we just set a record!”

It was a good thing they had twenty-eight minutes left on the timer instead of fifteen because his hands weren’t used to doing stuff like this. They started with the pinecone and made the star for the top of the tree before realizing that they didn’t have a way to make it stay up there. Noelle gasped, then ran out of the room. Moments later, she returned with a triumphant smile on her face, holding an empty toilet paper roll. “We’ll just hot glue it to this, and then we can just slide it down over the top branch.”

Surprisingly, it worked. They cut snowflakes out of the big tissue paper next, which wasn’t easy. Then, side by side, they laid out the snowflakes on the floor, corners overlapping, and taped them together, and started bunching them and tying the bunched part with ribbons. They were working so closely that their shoulders were nearly constantly touching, their hands brushing each other with every ribbon they tied. And every time they did, it sent a new feeling of euphoria through him.

The same thing happened as they cut ribbons, glued them to the back of the star pretzels, and then cut little snowflakes from the shiny silver paper. It was too thick to fold and cut like Aiden had, so they quickly used the square and round hole punches to make it look as close as possible to snowflakes.

Then they went to work putting all their decorations on the tree. As they hung the garland, they pushed some of the lights through the holes in the thin paper, making it look like moonlight spilling over fresh snow. It amazed him how well they worked together, seeming to anticipate each other’s moves, working so much more quickly than he could’ve guessed.

They got the final pretzel stars and silver snowflakes hung on the tree just as Noelle’s mom called out, “Five-minute warning!”

Noelle turned to him, her breaths coming fast, a look of wonder on her face. “We finished with five minutes to spare! Can you believe it? And look how amazing our tree is!” She gave him a hug, and he gave her a tight squeeze back.

They both turned to admire their handiwork. He had to admit he was impressed that they could decorate the tree in the amount of time they had and make it look awesome. He felt taller just looking at it.

“We’ve got time,” Noelle said. “Maybe we can get a few more lights to show through the garland.”

They both leaned in, hands working together as they moved around the tree, this time without the sense of urgency that had driven them for the past hour. This time, he just reveled in being so close to Noelle, being so in sync with her.

On one particularly tough part, where the tape made the garland bunch up weird, they were both leaned in close, both of their hands bumping each other as they worked, and Noelle turned her face from the tree to his. He looked over, too, their faces barely a couple of inches apart. He could feel her quiet breath, smell her shampoo, which smelled remarkably like gingerbread, and see the longing in her eyes.

She was so beautiful. He’d known it for a long time. But now he understood how much of her beauty came from the person she was on the inside, shining through for all to see.

She bit her bottom lip, and his eyes were immediately drawn to those lips. Those lips that he’d imagined kissing a million times over, stopping himself each time. Then he saw her eyes shift to his lips, too.

Then, after a quick breath, Noelle’s hands flew to his face, her palms resting against the sides of his face, her fingertips in his hair, and her lips were on his. He let out a slight groan, and they both straightened to standing as he put an arm around her waist, pulling her closer.

Her lips moved against his with the same sense of urgency they had felt while decorating the tree. A need to hurry before time ran out.

There’s time , he thought. We have time.

And, just like they’d been in sync all evening, she seemed to be in sync with his thoughts, too. The sense of urgency seemed to flee, and she relaxed into the kiss, her fingers slowly skimming along his cheeks, down his neck, across his collarbone, her hands coming to rest on his shoulders.

A tiny voice said that he shouldn’t be kissing her. But a much louder voice, one that only spoke in emotions, told him that this was perfect. She was perfect. Kissing her was perfect. That part of him exploded with hope, adoration, happiness, peace. A dream a year and a half in the making coming to life.

He was here with Noelle. And if he wasn’t mistaking the emotions she seemed to be pouring into this kiss, she felt about him the same as he felt about her. Heat radiated through him, a lightness in his limbs, a tension-free calm spreading out from his chest.

“Time’s up!” Noelle’s mom called from the kitchen.

Noelle pulled away ever so slightly, and he traced kisses along her jaw, then paused with his lips just brushing her ear and whispered, “I think that means we should stop.”

She sighed and sank into him, her body pressed against his, a hand resting on his chest, filling him full of light and heat. “There should be a trophy for that because I’m pretty sure we just won.”

He chuckled softly. “I think we did.”

As he heard the footsteps of walking adults and racing kids heading back to the central kitchen and family room area from all the places in the house they’d scattered to, that quiet voice inside him whispered just barely loud enough to be heard, But you’re her boss.

He ignored it as, hand-in-hand, they headed into the family room with everyone else.