When in December (Home Haven #1)

Chapter 1

one

. . .

Poppy

To be honest, for a while there, I really thought love was dead. Dead in the ground. Torched with flames. Dead. I was never going to find the magical fairy tale—and not for a lack of trying or sparing my own feelings.

I did the dating thing. I went on blind dates that only served to convince me my parents either had no idea who I was at all or they were secretly laughing behind my back at the comically terrible men they’d set me up with. I even tried the more socially acceptable thing where I dressed in something pretty and low-cut so that someone would notice me in a bar, where I sipped a drink that tasted like too much lime, far past my normal bedtime. I even did the relationship thing. And that one? That one nearly ruined me entirely.

Then, everything changed.

Falling in love, I learned, could be situated tightly against the phrase has potential.

It was a famous line in an interview from Michelle Maven, my boss and the creator of one of the most recognized home design and entertainment companies in the entire city—and soon, the country.

Home Haven insisted that making a house a home could easily be the most stunning of mundane magic. It was romanticizing your own life. In this world, we all needed a little of that. That kind of comfort. That kind of love.

It was also what Michelle had said when she took a chance and hired me two years ago.

I had potential.

She’d also told me I had a strong self-starter personality. That was likely why I was still in the office at seven thirty in the evening when I was supposed to go home at five, dropping a bag of takeout on my desk, covered in layout plans detailing my next project and paint swatches that were beginning to look a little too similar to one another.

At the paper bag crinkling, Hannah perked up on the other side of our shared cubicle. She twisted around in her plush, pink-cushioned desk chair, which, though comfortable, squeaked incessantly with every tiny movement. At first, the sound had been annoying. But after Hannah sitting behind me five days a week, at minimum, for the past two years, the high-pitched squeal of metal on metal was almost comforting to my otherwise shot nerves.

Hannah also had a keen sense of hearing whenever food was brought into the office past six p.m.—it was basically her love language.

She leaned back in her chair, a soft blanket hanging over my friend’s shoulders. A piece of the black licorice she normally kept in a glass container on her desk dangled between her teeth.

Soft hazel eyes widened behind clear acetate blue-light glasses.

What are you doing here? she mouthed, pointing to her headset, where I could hear the distant hum of someone talking to her over the Home Haven Hotline.

What does it look like I’m doing? I mouthed right back.

With a click, Hannah muted herself. “Clearly, you’re not at home, like you should be.”

I waved her off.

“You said that you were going to get some sleep for once.”

I’d slept. Sure, it might not have been as much as some people within the past week or two, but it was enough. I started to take out the to-go containers. Immediately, Hannah’s attention shifted toward the Thai noodles and spring rolls with peanut sauce. Once, I’d made sure to get vegetarian just for her until she turned me on to them.

I could never resist a good peanut sauce.

“I have to go back over the plans for the Hayes-Preston home.”

I handed her container over. She took it from my hands and popped open the lid.

“Again?”

“Construction is set to be complete tomorrow, which means I start tomorrow,” I reminded her.

Even though, as of now, the construction company we’d hired this past summer to get a head start on the place still hadn’t replied to my emails or phone calls for a more updated update.

“And the floor plan is a tad out of the ordinary.”

“If you have the place completely done already by the time you get up there to decorate for the holiday, there’s going to be nothing left for you to do for the rest of the year. You’re taking the fun out of it,” said Hannah.

I smirked as I sat down and settled in for my takeout. The place we got the food from was always the best since they were nearby, and somehow, the food was always hot. I could feel the warmth seeping through the plastic container into my palms. “This is the fun of it.”

“Only you would say that.”

I pointed with my fork back to her headset.

She shook her head. “Still talking.”

I twirled my noodles. At my pause, Hannah reached up to click back on her headset. Soon enough, whatever story the person on the other end was telling her about their holiday plans would come to an end.

I took it as my chance to murmur, “Michelle also sent out an email, asking if I would be in the office tonight. She’s leaving with some of the other senior staff for their retreat tomorrow. She said she had something important to tell me.”

“She what?” Hannah gasped before realizing her headset was no longer muted. “No, I apologize. Not you, ma’am. What was your question again? No, of course, I’m not judging your question about vegan options to make this season. We have a whole section on our website categorized by occasion. A coworker of mine came in and—oh, yes, there’s tea.” Her eyes flicked to me, sparkling. “Verbal, not herbal.”

When she said it like that, gossip truly sounded like a disease.

“Do you think it’s about the … you know?” Hannah whispered toward me, covering up her microphone this time.

The promotion? I had to think so. It was the only thing that made sense.

I smiled down at my food, feeling the rush of giddiness that hadn’t left me since I’d opened the email this morning, asking me to stick around.

Unlike during my first year, when I had constantly felt like I had one foot out the door whenever I accidentally Replied All or tripped over the pointy high heels I couldn’t wear to save my life and spilled senior interior designers’ coffee, I knew that Michelle wasn’t going to call me into her office anymore to show me the door.

Though I didn’t want to sound full of myself, once I’d gotten the hang of things, I was good at my job. Enough so that for the past year, Michelle had been teasing me with the fact that my work and seniority over the other entry-level staff meant I was a shoo-in for a promotion to senior interior designer once the budget turned for the year.

And it was almost the end of the year.

The promotion in title, along with what felt like my first-ever big-girl salary at the ripe age of thirty, was another reason I didn’t mind putting in the extra hours at work the past few weeks. Months.

Hannah grinned as she talked through her recommendations to the woman on the phone. She went over the pros and cons of spaghetti squash over butternut and how pomegranate seeds could bring a festive aesthetic into your holiday meal.

In between breaths, she took a bite of a spring roll. As she chewed, she put her hands together as if in prayer to silently thank me.

Hannah might have had the best and worst job at Home Haven, yet she never complained about the hours she spent attached to her computer and headset. I almost envied the way the perky twenty-six-year-old was able to slip on her fluffy slippers under her desk, twirling the cord as if she were a teenage girl talking to her crush about his favorite color instead of the perfect temperature to cook a turkey and how to make your own cranberry sauce.

Almost.

I couldn’t handle talking to anyone for eight hours a day, if not more with the amount of voluntary overtime Hannah picked up. I could barely handle more than two meetings in a day with the rest of the Home Haven staff—consisting of interior designers, bloggers, and event planners—whose mission was to make the everyday in your home a little more special.

It was the idea of romanticizing your life that had first drawn me into Home Haven.

Once I, a devout DIY renovation admirer, had found out a woman-owned business of my dreams existed, there was one place I desperately wanted to work, even if it wasn’t far from home, like I’d always thought I would end up.

No matter what, I was proud of myself.

I’d done it. I’d made it. Not to mention, I was pretty sure I was in the minority of the world when I said how much I loved my job and meant it.

Pulling off her headset, Hannah dropped it on her desk. She took a huge bite of noodles and didn’t bother fully chewing before she spoke. “Look at you. Going to have a big promotion before New Year’s. I feel like a proud mother. Seriously, are you going to leave me? You totally are. You’re going to be put in one of the fancy side offices now and forget about the sad little administrative assistant turned Home Haven call girl.”

“Don’t call yourself a call girl.”

She barked a laugh. “Now, all we have to do is get you a man, and Poppy Owens’s fantasies will have come true.”

“I don’t need a man.”

“No one said you needed one, but take it from me.” Hannah looked up toward the ceiling, as if remembering her last online dating rendezvous, which she normally saved to tell me about on Monday mornings. Sometimes, the stories she had were the only things that made me pull myself out of bed and into work with something akin to pep in my step. “It’s nice once in a while.”

“I don’t need someone to be nice to me.”

“Why not? It’s great. And if anyone needs someone to take them out and treat them like a lady, it’s you. Don’t let your assbag ex ruin things for you.”

Of course, she’d had to bring him back up again. We both remembered the eventful day nearly two years ago. It was one of Hannah’s first days at Home Haven. It was also one of the only times I’d cried in the office.

Luckily, it hadn’t scared her away.

“Assbag?” I questioned.

“Yes, it sounds right.”

“You didn’t even know him.”

“I don’t need to in order to preach the cold, hard truth. I saw him that one time when you asked him to pick you up from work,” Hannah insisted with enough force that she had to swat away a piece of copper hair that had flown forward into her freckled nose, which scrunched in indignation. “He made a big deal about it. Plus, what kind of non-assbag without masculinity issues leaves you all of a sudden because?—”

A head popped around the corner of our cubicle. “Am I interrupting?”

As if on cue, Hannah’s computer monitor lit up behind her. The hotline rang its steady trill.

She grinned brightly up at Michelle as she turned around to affix her headset back into its proper place, where her hair had a permanent indent from her wearing it all day. “Not at all.”

Michelle chuckled.

“Home Haven Holiday Hotline, this is Hannah.”

Now that Hannah was back to work, Michelle turned toward me.

I started to put away my food, putting the lid back on and sliding it back into the bag. “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t apologize. Tomorrow is the big day. You start your first large-scale solo project on the ground, correct?” Michelle asked.

I shifted in my seat. Should I get up or sit down? I knew most of the other designers had a comfortable rapport with Michelle, but for some reason, I still could never stop seeing her as the person I’d looked up to for years before I got my job here.

When I compared myself to Michelle, I always fell short. It was kind of hard not to. Michelle Maven was elegant and confident. She was a home design icon . She wore crisp, fitted blouses in cool winter shades that didn’t wash her out and defined what it meant to style something versus just wearing clothing, like I did.

Every day, I showed up to work in what I knew looked nice enough on me. It usually included one of my multiple pairs of patterned dress pants and loose blouse combinations, which might’ve been more appropriate for a fifty-year-old librarian than an up-and-coming contemporary home aficionado.

“It’s always an exciting thing to sink your design teeth into a whole new palette,” said Michelle with a bright smile, stretching her lipstick, but never smudging. “I know the overview of your first big project, but I can’t wait to hear more about what you’ve come up with when we have a chance to talk more. Would you mind coming back to my office with me for a moment?”

“Sure.” My flats squeaked on the floor as I followed her toward the back corner of her office, illuminated by the soft glow of Tiffany lamps.

Surrounding Michelle’s wide desk were various mood boards for the larger important projects she was working on with the senior teams. Aside from that, it was just Michelle now who was about to talk to me and … Alison.

Wait a second. Alison was here?

Alison, another junior interior designer who had started a few months after I did, sat in a chair across from Michelle’s desk. Her leg crossed over the other, making her pleated maxi skirt flare toward her sleek leather boots.

I might’ve stood staring at her for a second too long.

“Have a seat.” Michelle waved for me to make myself comfortable.

I sat on the edge of the second chair stiffly, turning toward Alison with a short smile. She appeared completely at ease with her long, silky brown hair twisted up into a simple knot.

Michelle sat back in the leather chair behind her desk, cluttered similarly to my own with paint chips and molding corners, yet everything was stacked neatly in its proper place. “I wanted to meet with the two of you before the holidays got into full swing. Let’s get right down to it.”

I didn’t think she was going to fire me. She couldn’t. If anything, Home Haven had taken off in the past year and a half to new heights that even Michelle had admitted she never foresaw. I wasn’t going to second-guess myself now, but if Home Haven had to let some people go … firing me and Alison made sense. We were both junior interior designers, preparing for news before the budget changes for the next year.

But was it good news? It had to be good news.

“Both of you are up for a promotion at the start of the new year. As you know, we have a biannual evaluation for promotions when they are being considered. However,” Michelle prefaced with a deep breath, “our wonderful human resources director, Tabitha, has informed me that since we started the Home Haven publication division, only one promotion from junior to senior interior designer is possible.

“You’re both amazing workers. Unfortunately, these things happen. It’s logistics. This doesn’t mean that you won’t be considered for a promotion in the future. For the time being, I thought of a solution to solve our problem.” Michelle opened her hands as if in offering to us both. “We have a last-minute spread within our upcoming magazine issue. An article fell through. So, I figured, why not have some friendly competition?”

“I’m not sure I understand.” Was I the only one still lost here? “Alison and I are competing against each other for the senior interior designer role?”

“All in good fun, yes.”

Fun. Fun?

“Both of you are working on some of your first independent design projects here at Home Haven, centered around the winter season. As you complete your projects, one of our photographers will come in. I’ll assess from the photographs and progress reports. The best design for our readers wins. You’ll get the design byline in Home Haven Magazine as well as the promotion.”

Was she serious? It was clear she was, but my heart started to beat a little faster in my chest.

After the past two years as a junior interior designer and being told the job was mine more than a few times, I’d thought that, well, it was mine. I’d finally have the job title I always imagined. The job title I’d worked for and deserved.

Earned.

Something was going to work out and fall into place. At last.

“I’m aware this is unusual, but a little friendly competition never hurt anyone. Most of the office will be in and out come December with the holidays, so please feel free to use anyone or each other to help make these two homes places to be proud of. I know you two already will. Do what you do best and make a home a haven.” The edges of Michelle’s lips quirked up. “That was cheesy, wasn’t it? Anyway, you get what I mean.”

Alison smiled as if she couldn’t have planned for better news. “It was perfect.”

“Does this sound all right to both of you then? I don’t want to make either of you uncomfortable. Have a good time and use your resources. Poppy?”

Uncomfortable? I wasn’t sure what I was feeling, but I was certain that I was past that. I’d just finalized all my plans for the home I was going to see for the first time outside of pictures tomorrow. Now, I suddenly had the desire to throw it all out and start over again. But I couldn’t give up. I wouldn’t.

I could handle this. I could do difficult things and then some even if it meant pulling another week of all-nighters to make sure that I didn’t fail.

I refused to let myself down.

“Yes,” I finally replied. “Sounds great.”

“Wonderful. Alison?”

Alison shrugged her shoulders like this truly was all in good fun. “Agreed.”

“Great. Now, both of you should head home. It’s crazy that any of us are still in the office at this time. Get some good sleep and be ready to take on your projects,” Michelle advised. “Have a great rest of your night.”

“Have a good retreat,” said Alison.

Startled by the end of the conversation, I didn’t realize that they’d both stood. I jerked myself to my feet. “Thank you.”

“Have a great first day on your project tomorrow, Poppy. Give me a call if anything isn’t what we’ve prepared for.”

I dipped my head in another nod, heading out of the office behind Alison. Once Michelle’s door shut behind us, Alison finally glanced up at me from where she stood, about five inches shorter.

I’d seen Alison’s designs before. We’d even worked together on projects within the past year. I liked Alison. She was pleasant enough, though kept mostly to herself. More than that, I was impressed by her truly contemporary style that people oohed and aahed over whenever they caught photographs of the before and after.

Now, I had to go head-to-head against her for a promotion I’d thought … God, how stupid was I to assume it was mine?

“That was a lot, huh?” Alison asked.

“Kind of.”

“We’re both going to do great,” she said. “You’ll let me know if you need anything when everyone is out of the office. I have a feeling we’re going to be the only two working out on-site once we get closer to Christmas.”

“Of course. You do the same.”

“Thank you, Poppy.”

“Why are you thanking me?”

“I know that you’ve been here a little longer than me?—”

“It’s all good. I didn’t know you were doing a solo project too,” I said.

“Near South Point.”

“That’s cool.”

“Where is yours?” Alison asked.

“Outside of the city actually,” I said, suddenly realizing how different our projects were going to be, even compared to a stylistic standpoint. “It’s a smaller place up in the mountains.”

Her long lashes brushed her cheeks once in what must’ve been shock. “You’re driving there?”

Everyone was saying that to me, including Hannah, who joked about putting out an alert to all the other drivers that I was heading up that way as the weather started to turn. I might not be the best driver. But I could handle a highway.

“Yeah. It should be fine.”

“I’m sure it will be,” Alison reassured. “I’m headed out tonight. Need to get some sleep before I rethink some things now.”

I nodded. “Have a good night.”

“You too.”

Heading back into my cubicle, I flopped down in my chair. Hannah started to clean up, looping the cord around her headset. Her eyes studied me.

I covered my face with my hands.

“What happened? Did she tell you that you weren’t going to get it?”

I shook my head.

“Wait, you weren’t fired, right?”

I shook my head again. I didn’t even know what to do now. Slowly, I grabbed the food I’d only partially eaten and started to gather my things into my tote bag that single-handedly held my entire life. Pens and printed directions and more paint chips that I continued to go back and forth on rolled around inside, but none of it was what I needed now.

“Finally ready to head home?” asked Hannah.

“So ready.”