Sleigh Bell Dreams (Mistletoe Meadows Sweet Christmas #1)

Chapter 5

Judd blinked, feeling pain shoot through his head, down his elbows, and almost immediately his entire face felt like it was three times bigger than its usual size.

The lady in front of him didn’t look like she meant to hit him. She didn’t look like a threat; in fact, she looked like...Terry McBride.

Amy had mentioned she might be coming.

He had been out until almost three AM the night before cleaning the courthouse building. He cleaned it at night so he didn’t get in the way of their using it during the day. On the weekends, it was locked up tight. He could get in, but that gave him the weekends for his other jobs.

Regardless, he had just gotten up.

And now he felt like he was missing something.

She didn’t look like she was pulling her fist back for a second punch, and instead, she was talking.

“I’m so sorry! I was going to knock again. I’ve already knocked twice, and I just wanted to make sure you heard it, so I was going to knock as hard as I could and wasn’t expecting you to open the door really fast.”

“Because you already knocked twice.” That was why he had opened the door fast. He didn’t mention that he had been expecting her or was at least looking for her. Or he might have stayed in bed another hour.

“Right, and you were trying to get there before I left.” She shook her head, and she looked so abashed and regretful that he almost smiled. He tried to make it a point not to smile too much. He was of the mind that scarcity made smiles more meaningful.

Or at least that’s what his mom always teased him about. He just was not a natural smiler. He kinda had to think about it before his face moved.

He didn’t know anyone else with that problem, so maybe it was just him, or maybe he’d end up reading a book someday and finding out that half the world was like him, and he’d grown up without knowing it.

Regardless, he looked at the woman standing in front of him, already knowing what she was probably going to ask and knowing what he was going to say.

Amy was good. He had to give her that.

“So, I’m going to have a bit of a weird request, but you might know my sister Amy McBride.”

“Amy? McBride?” He scrunched up his nose, pretending to think.

“Yeah. She’s...my sister. And she also runs the pet sanctuary up on the hill.”

“There’s a pet sanctuary?”

He was terrible at this. Really awful, but Amy had asked him to pretend to be surprised. Or confused, acting like he didn’t know what she was talking about.

Typically, Judd didn’t really have to spend a whole lot of time pretending. What most people said went right over his head. He just thought about things, noticed things, but didn’t really talk about them.

“Yes. Well, never mind. If you don’t know about it, it’s not going to help. Anyway, I heard you might be willing to rent out your duplex.”

He drew his brows down, and then, as though he didn’t quite understand what she was saying, he stuck his thumb in his belt and looked left and then right. Then, he straightened back up, looked her in the eye, and said, “Does this look like a duplex?”

That took the wind out of her sails. He could see her deflate, bite her lip, and look off to the side as she said, “No?”

He almost asked, “what makes you think it is,” but he bit his tongue and just stayed silent.

“Amy said it was,” she said in a small voice, which tugged on his heartstrings, more than he wanted to admit.

“I see.”

He didn’t say anything else, like, “it actually is a duplex, it just doesn’t look like it from the outside,” which was why he was questioning her, except that wasn’t entirely true. He was questioning her because Amy asked him to play dumb.

There were a lot of people who would joke and say that it wasn’t hard for him to play dumb. At least, he assumed they would be joking.

“So is it?” she finally asked, when he said nothing else. He’d found that if he stayed quiet, people had a tendency to talk. He just had to be able to live through the awkward moments until they finally figured out that he wasn’t going to say anything, so they had to.

“Yes,” he answered.

“So... Are both sides rented out?”

“No.”

Her eyes slid sideways again, which was something she seemed to do when she was thinking. Interesting.

“Are you interested in renting it out?”

He pretended to think about it. After all, this was supposed to be a surprise. He didn’t have it advertised anywhere, and he really wasn’t interested in renting it out. Except to Terry.

“I might be.”

“If?”

“Depends on who, I guess,” he said easily, like he hadn’t taken the hint that she was interested.

He leaned against the doorframe, the pain in his face dulling to a mild thump. He was pretty sure he was going to have a black eye. That might be an interesting story to tell, if he told stories.

“What about me?”

“Do we know each other?” He tilted his head, like he was studying her, trying to figure out if he missed something.

“I think we went to school together.”

He almost laughed. They had gone to school together. They’d graduated together too. But while he knew all about her, he was pretty sure she didn’t have a clue about him. Despite the fact that they’d spent six years in homeroom together. Since her name started with an M, and his with an L. They’d not sat side by side, but close.

He probably should be offended over that, but he went out of his way to make himself...not invisible, just not draw attention to himself. His parents hadn’t cared, but his grandmother had drilled that into his head. Let your actions speak for you. You don’t need to have people looking at you, getting attention for what you’re doing. Let them see Jesus in you .

He heard that all of his life growing up, and it meshed with his naturally reticent personality. He was never one of the people who enjoyed getting up and having all eyes on him. He was much more comfortable in the back of the class. He might have cracked jokes, except while he enjoyed making people laugh, he didn’t really enjoy the attention that came with being the one who’d made the joke.

“What year did you graduate?” he finally asked, since she seemed to be trying to figure out what to say, and she could hardly say, “I don’t really remember you.”

Although he supposed she could. It just wouldn’t be conducive to convincing him to rent out the apartment. She had no idea that he had every intention of renting the apartment to her, and had, in fact, spent the day yesterday cleaning it up.

She named the year, and he pretended to look surprised. “Yeah. We graduated the same year. Funny that.”

“I thought so. I mean, your name sounded familiar when Amy said it, but I couldn’t really put a face to it. But the dark eyes and dark hair were kind of what I pictured in my head. Only, I kinda pictured you without a black eye.”

He almost lost it there. He was pretty sure she was making a joke.

“If you’d have seen me before you knocked on the door, you might have recognized me.”

She snorted and laughed. “I really am sorry about that.”

“Hey, it could happen to anyone. I mean, it’s never happened to me, but that’s not saying it couldn’t.”

“Yeah. Stop trying to make me feel better. You’re just...going overboard there.”

He liked it. She wasn’t letting him intimidate her. Sometimes his silences could be disconcerting, and she was plowing through. Of course, she was desperate to have a place to live too.

“Do you think that you might be able to rent me your empty duplex?”

“How much noise are you planning on making?” he asked, barely able to keep a straight face.

“Oh, I’m very quiet.”

“Do you have pets?”

“No...” She drew the word out, and he drew his brows down right away.

“I don’t have a no pet policy, but only because I’ve never rented out that side before.”

“I don’t have any pets. I kind of wanted one, since I love animals, but I couldn’t have one in the city.”

“I see. So you think country people are...dirtier?”

That was not a fair question, and he almost didn’t ask it, and he probably should stop messing with her. Amy had asked him to play dumb, not scare her away. And he wasn’t sure how determined she was to rent from him.

Still, he hadn’t given in easy, and he was pretty sure she had no idea he’d been waiting on her. That had been the goal.

“Of course I don’t.”

“It kinda sounded that way.”

“No. I just meant, where I lived before, they didn’t allow me to have pets. I wanted one. And now that I’m finally back here in Mistletoe Meadows, I was kinda thinking that I could, especially since I just visited Amy—”

“Her pet sanctuary, or something?”

“Yeah. And she has a terrier mix. It’s just adorable.”

“Everyone adopts golden retrievers.”

“You’re probably right. You’re not really worried about them biting you, or attacking your family, the way you might a different dog, like a German shepherd, or a rottweiler, or a pit bull.”

He jerked his chin and didn’t say anything.

“Anyway. If you don’t allow pets, that’s fine. I just...didn’t mean anything by it.”

“You can have pets.” He held up a hand. “No goats in the house.”

He was pretty sure she was swallowing a laugh or a snort or something. She looked a little bit like her cheeks puffed out, and then her neck stretched out, and then she nodded slowly, her face completely serious. “I won’t bring any goats in the house.”

“All right. There might be more rules, but that’s number one.”

“Got it.” She swallowed, looked at the ground for a moment, and then back up. “Does this mean I have it?”

“Means I’m thinking about it. Don’t you want to see it first?”

“Okay.”

He pushed away from the doorjamb. “You’re going to come in the house, and you’re not gonna punch me in the face again. Okay?”

“We did get off to a bad start. I really am sorry about that.”

“I just wanted to lay some ground rules down.”

“Got it. No punching. No goats.”

“Well. I think you’re smart. I kinda remember you being on the positive side of average.”

“Yeah. I have, sometimes, been told that I’m rather intelligent.”

He kept his face serious. It was hilarious that she hadn’t told him that she was a doctor. He wondered why she hadn’t. He couldn’t believe that she missed the opportunity to put him in his place.

Or maybe she was still trying to figure out why he felt like he needed to tell her that there were no goats allowed in the house.

The look on her face was priceless. He almost wished he had a camera. Amy would get a huge kick out of this.