Snowflakes and Surprises (Evergreen Hollow Christmas #2)

Chapter 14

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The last vestiges of the sunset were starting to sink behind the trees as Caroline pulled the prepped leftovers out of the fridge, getting ready to assemble and warm them up for dinner. Most of the guests had ventured out to have dinner at Rockridge Grill or Marie’s, leaving only a few in the living room, the wine and snacks hour ended. She had cleaned up the trays of mulled wine and wrapped up the remaining cookies and brownies and peppermint bark—and now it was time to get dinner ready for herself and her parents. Fortunately, she’d meal prepped over the weekend, so it wasn’t as daunting of a task as it might have been.

And then, just as she was taking the lid off of the container of mixed roasted vegetables, she heard the screeching sound of one of the smoke detectors going off.

“Not again .” She slammed the lid back down, a little harder than strictly necessary, wiping her hands on her jeans as she hurried out of the kitchen. She saw one of the guests sitting by the fire starting to stand up, and she waved a hand, a sense of exhaustion settling over her. “It’s okay. I’m going to go check it out—it’s just something from the kitchen, I’m sure.”

She was so sick of it. The inn was meant to be a place of calm, a place for relaxation and time away from stress and anxiety for their guests—not the cause of it. And the constant faulty detectors were only going to have the opposite effect—not to mention making it seem as if the inn was in disrepair, rather than being meticulously well-maintained. She took pride in that, especially, and it gnawed at her that anyone might have a reason to think otherwise.

The issues made no sense. She was ready to just throw all of them out—but then, of course, they’d be violating safety regulations. That wouldn’t bode well for the inn either. So she just had to deal with it, and try to figure out what the problem was.

As if she didn’t have a thousand other things to worry about too.

She found the offending smoke detector in an upstairs bathroom. She knocked, feeling a little foolish as she realized that no one would have stayed in the room with the piercing shriek of the alarm going off, and walked in, wincing at the noise. She’d brought a small stepladder up with her, and climbed up, covering the smoke detector with a cloth in case some waft from the kitchen had come up and triggered it. She couldn’t imagine what. She’d only just started preheating the oven, but it was the only thing she could think of.

It kept shrieking. She pushed the reset button, but nothing changed. It kept shrieking, and she gritted her teeth, feeling like she wanted to scream along with it. She briefly considered it—after all, it wasn’t like anyone was going to hear her over the shattering noise.

“Just—stop it!” She smacked it with her hand, rolled her fist up in the dishtowel and punched it. “Stop!”

Frustrated beyond belief, she grabbed a screwdriver, undoing it from the mount on the wall. But it kept shrieking .

“What is wrong with you!” She shook it, hard, dimly aware of how comical she would look to anyone who walked in—shaking a smoke detector and shouting at it as if it were a person. But she was at her wits’ end.

The batteries . Caroline flipped it over, fumbling with the catch on the back, but it wouldn’t come loose. She growled with frustration, the sound coming out from between gritted teeth, and one of her already short nails chipped as she tried to pry it loose. It wouldn’t budge as the shrieking continued, and she felt as if the sound was going to make her head explode.

She needed it to stop .

She stomped out of the bathroom, hurrying downstairs with the awful thing wrapped in the dishtowel. The guests in the living room looked up as Caroline rushed outside, and she felt her cheeks burn with embarrassment at the disturbance. She tried to keep things peaceful, to stick by the rules, to make sure that everyone was happy and calm at all times—and this was what she got. A problem that wouldn’t stop no matter how hard she worked to fix it.

The smoke detector was still beeping. For a moment, she fantasized about throwing it down into the snow and stepping on it hard, but a part of her wondered if even that would fix it. And besides, she definitely didn’t want any of the guests looking out of the window and seeing her lose her cool that much.

Instead, with no other idea of what to do, she yanked open the trunk of her car and threw it inside, slamming the trunk shut.

She could still hear the infernal beeping.

And then, as if to make everything worse, she saw Rhett’s truck coming up the driveway.

She saw Rhett step out, and she felt her heart slide down to her feet. She wished she could simply vanish into the snow, the beeping still echoing in her ears from the trunk as she leaned against it, and she tried to think frantically of some way to cover the sound of the faulty detector. But she had no idea how.

Rhett smiled as he saw her, and she felt her heart do a backflip.

“Hey there. What’s going on?” He hesitated as he reached her, looking quizzically at the trunk of her car. “Why is your trunk beeping?”

Caroline felt heat start to creep up her neck, and she sighed.

“A smoke detector upstairs went off,” she said tiredly. “Once again, apparently for no reason I can see. I tried to get it to turn off, but nothing worked. I can’t even get the batteries out. So I panicked, and…” She motioned exhaustedly toward the car. “Well, you can hear it well enough.”

Rhett chuckled. “Can I try to help? I don’t think we can just leave it in the trunk—it sounds too ominous. Like a countdown to a bomb explosion,” he added with a laugh.

Caroline felt her flush deepen. “All right.” She stepped back, opening the trunk and wincing as the sharp sound filled the air again. “You’re the expert.”

“That’s right, I am.”

Rhett gave her a wink that made her blush even more, reaching for the smoke detector. He fiddled with the panel on the back, and for a second, she thought he wasn’t going to be able to get it loose either. She wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to get the sound to stop, or feel vindicated that it wasn’t just her.

But then, the panel popped free, and Rhett shook the batteries loose. Blessed silence filled the cold air between them, and Caroline was so relieved that she forgot to be embarrassed that he’d succeeded in a few seconds where she hadn’t managed to at all.

“Thank you,” she said, holding out her hand for the batteries. “What brought you up here? Not a call about this, I guess, since you came in your own vehicle.”

“No, actually.” Rhett grinned, leaning against the trunk. “I saw your mom—Rhonda—at The Mellow Mug the other morning, when I stopped in for a cup of coffee before work. I told her how delicious those pumpkin cream cheese muffins that you gave me were, and she suggested I stop by tonight and pick up some more of your baked goods.”

That’s not why she suggested it.

Caroline knew all too well how her mother’s meddling could go. She’d seen it in action with Nora, and she knew this had nothing to do with supplying the newest Evergreen Hollow firefighter with baked goods. It had everything to do with her mother trying to set her and Rhett up.

She laughed, both because of how ridiculous it all was, and because of how clearly keen Rhett was on the idea. “You’ve got a sweet tooth, then?”

“I do,” Rhett admitted with mock solemnity. “I can’t help it. Sugar is my weakness. And I was told I could get my fix here, if you’d be so kind.”

“I did make some peppermint brownies.” Caroline motioned toward the porch. “They’re fresh out of the oven, I made them for the guests earlier. There are leftovers, if you want me to wrap some up for you.”

“I certainly won’t say no.”

She led Rhett up the steps, grateful that this debacle with the smoke detector had ended without too much more chaos. The guests, to her relief, seemed to have already moved past it—one of them was gone, probably upstairs, and the other two playing checkers by the fire didn’t even glance up at her and Rhett as they walked by.

“Your sister Nora brought me an invitation to her Christmas party,” Rhett mentioned casually, as Caroline went to get the brownies. “She seemed to think I should pass along an invitation to you.”

Caroline frowned. “Of course I’m going to her party. She’s my sister.”

Rhett chuckled. “Well, she seemed to think you’d like an invitation from someone else as well, and she suggested I be the one to do it.”

Mortification instantly washed over her, and she was glad her back was turned, so Rhett couldn’t see how hot her face was. She shook her head, taking her time wrapping up a few of the brownies to let the blush in her cheeks cool down. “I hope you’re not offended,” she said, avoiding glancing back at him.

“What?” Rhett sounded confused. “Why on earth would I be offended?”

Because my sister is really good at putting her nose in everyone else’s business. My whole family is, actually.

“I—just making sure. Nora gets overexcited sometimes,” she answered hurriedly, trying to brush it away. She wrapped wax paper around the brownies in a stack, turning around to hand them to him.

“Well, I was thinking…” Rhett took the brownies, looking at her thoughtfully. “I thought maybe asking you to the Christmas party would be a bit much, since we don’t really know each other all that well. But then I had the idea, what if we went out for coffee first? Would you like that?”

For a moment, Caroline didn’t know how to respond. She felt floored. Completely taken aback that he would ask.

He’s just trying to make Nora’s suggestion seem less awkward, she thought.

He was asking her out of pity, nothing more. After all, Nora telling him that he should be her ‘date’ to the Christmas party just highlighted the fact that there was no one already living in Evergreen Hollow who was going to ask her. Nora might as well have put a giant sign on Caroline’s head broadcasting that she was all alone. That she didn’t have any kind of dating life. So much so that the newcomer needed to be roped into asking.

There was no way this man was actually interested. Right? And she didn’t want to go out on a pity date. That felt worse than simply staying in.

“That’s very nice of you,” she said, as diplomatically as possible. “But this time of year is really busy for me. The closer it gets to Christmas, I really don’t have all that much extra time. It’s nice of you to ask though.”

She thought she saw a flicker of disappointment in Rhett’s face. But surely she’d imagined it. She must have.

“That’s all right.” Rhett smiled, and Caroline felt sure that she’d misread the expression on his face. “Thanks for the brownies. I’ll get going, then.”

She felt her heart sink as she watched him go, wondering if she’d made a mistake by saying no. But she didn’t want to be an object of pity, or someone he asked to coffee just to smooth things over. It felt worse than not being asked at all.

It was better to let it go, and focus on work. She was busy this time of year, that had been true. She had plenty to occupy her mind.

Rhett didn’t need to be one of those things.