Page 1 of When You're Home for the Holidays
Chapter one
Tori
“Goddamnglobalwarming.”Jakeknuckled the steering wheel of his Jeep as he sat up a bit straighter in the driver’s seat.
“Why don’t we just get off at the next rest stop and wait it out?” Fielding suggested from the second row. Tori peeked over her shoulder and smiled when she spotted Penny out of her travel crate all snuggled up in his lap. She glanced from her beloved pug mix to Fielding, a knowing smile playing across her expression.
“What?” he questioned, sounding more defensive than he probably intended. “She was letting out sad little puppy whimpers back here. We both know she hates storms. I wasn’t going to just leave her in there.” He gave Penny a little scratch behind the ears.
“This shit isn’t letting up anytime soon,” Jake explained as Tori righted herself in the passenger seat. She reached for her phone and opened the Weather app for the tenth time that hour. He was right—nothing but dark green thunderstorms on the radar spanning across the Midwest and the entire East Coast.So much for a white Christmas.
She held up her phone briefly so Fielding could see the radar for himself. “It’s supposed to rain for the next thirty-six hours. This sucks,” she muttered, closing out all the apps on her phone before mindlessly clicking on the Messages app again out of habit.
“Don’t worry, baby,” Jake tried to reassure her, addressing the fear in her heart she had yet to speak out loud. “He’ll get here.”
She nodded solemnly. She knew Rhett would do everything in his power to make it back from Virginia. But his flight home had already been canceled, and there was just nothing else available to Ohio or Michigan. The storms had disrupted flights all over the country, and everyone was frantically trying to rebook since Christmas was just three days away.
She couldn’t help but worry about Rhett being stranded at the airport overnight, camped out in a sky lounge or a random airport bar. Acid churned in her stomach when she thought about him being stuck, frustrated, and completely alone. The idea of him slipping hurt even more than the idea of spending their first Christmas as a married couple apart.
She was used to being away from him, to missing him when he was gone. That was a sacrifice she made on a regular basis. What she couldn’t stand was the idea that his desperation to get home for the holidays might tempt him into making irrational or harmful decisions.
“Hey,” Jake urged, pulling her out of her own head. “He’ll be here.” He took his eyes off the road for the briefest moment to give her a pointed look. “And if for some reason things don’t go according to plan, hewillbe okay. He’s doing really well, baby. He sounded good when I talked to him earlier this week.”
Tori let her head lull back against the headrest, closing her eyes as she let his words sink in. Rhett had been sober for almost six months to the day, ever since the accident that summer. Thankfully he was alone when he’d crashed Jake’s car into the base of the train bridge in downtown Hampton. No one else had been injured, and there weren't any legal repercussions. No one even bothered to check his blood alcohol level at the hospital that night.
“Hey, Tor? What are all these boxes back here? I can’t even recline my seat back so Princess Penny and I can get comfortable.”
She smiled as she thought about the contents of the boxes she and Jake had carefully loaded into the back of his Jeep last night. “Those are all my mom’s Christmas decorations.”
Fielding thumped a hand on top of a box behind him. “This isallChristmas shit?”“It’s not shit,” Tori chided. She knew he was just teasing her. But between the storms, Rhett’s canceled flight, and the anxiety about her upcoming surgery, her nerves were shot.
“My mom loved Christmas,” she explained, softer. “It was her very favorite holiday. She always went all out, even the last year she was with us.Especiallythe last year. I have at least a dozen memories surrounding every single ornament and decoration in those boxes.”
She righted herself and leaned forward to turn up the radio. When she settled back, she felt Fielding’s hand slip over the seat to squeeze her shoulder. It was a silent apology; his unspoken way of telling her he got it, no further explanation necessary.
“Are we doing a tree?” Fielding asked, his hand still casually hanging over her seat as his fingertips grazed the shoulder of her sweater.
“Yep. Rhett had a twelve-foot blue spruce delivered to the cabin last week. Although now that I think about it, I’m not sure we’ll have enough ornaments to totally cover it,” she mused, turning around to look past him to all the boxes stacked in the cargo area of the Jeep.
“Tori…”
All he said was her name, but she could tell by his tone and the excitement in his eyes that Fielding had an idea.
“That huge Christmas store is in Michigan, isn’t it? The world’s biggest Christmas store? The ‘keep Christ in Christmas’ store we keep seeing signs for? We should go. We should totally go there. We have to go! I have to run an errand this afternoon anyway, so we’ll already be out.” Fielding was practically bouncing in his seat with excitement.
“Easy,” Jake admonished. “It’s hard enough to focus on the road without you chirping in my ear and rocking the car back and forth.”
Fielding wasn’t deterred by the scolding. He leaned forward in his seat to continue his campaign, just in a lower voice.
“Tori. Seriously. Let’s go. I’ll drive. I’ll go slow in the rain, I swear.”
She turned around to glare at him, not aware of how close his face was to her seat. She gasped when she realized they were practically nose-to-nose. “Are you really begging right now? You’re worse than Penny.”
“Cuter though.” He scrunched up his face—and in a move that only Fielding Haas could get away with—booped her on the nose. “So what do you say, Victoria Thompson? Want to go on an adventure with me?”
She glanced over at Jake. She wasn’t seeking his permission necessarily, just feeling him out. He must have felt her eyes on him, because he piped up without prompting.
“I’m out, but you guys should go, and you can take the Jeep. I have to drive to the airport to get Maddie tomorrow morning, then I’ll have to drive back into Detroit whenever Rhett finally gets a flight, so I just want to chill once we get to the cabin.”
