Page 16 of The Mistletoe Bluff
“Oliver is the car scratcher and he hates me and now I have no car so he offered to give me rides and share his car with me!” I whined, but it came out more like, “Oliver…car scratcher…hates me…share his car with me!”
There was a beat of silence before she gasped. “Oliver’s the one who scratched your car?”
How she understood any part of my mumbled sentence was a testament to our friendship.
“I told you he hated me, Els.” I sighed. “Can you drive me to work for the next couple of weeks?”
An unattractive snort came through the phone.
That’s a good sign.
“Back up, start from the beginning,” she said instead.
With a sigh, I told her the story of how my archnemesis scratched my car and, even though he’d paid for the damage, I was now without a car for the foreseeable future.
Elsie was silent for a few moments when I finished.
“Let me get this straight. He made an oopsie, has done everything he can to fix it, even offering to drive you around Meridel, and you still think he hates you.”
I scowled, hoping she felt the power of it through the phone. “I think you missed the point.”
Elsie retorted, “No, I thinkyoudid.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve painted this guy to be the devil, but the fact of the matter is, he’s doing all the right things. If he hated you, he wouldn’t have even left a note on your car. He would’ve run and never looked back. He’s trying to make it rightandhelp you. That’s not my definition of an enemy.”
“Maybe I should get you a new dictionary for Christmas then.”
Elsie scoffed. “Maya.”
“Elsie.”
We both sighed at the same time.
“So, you can’t help me out then?” I asked.
“You know I would if I didn’t have my book deadline coming up, and we weren’t packing and getting ready to go out of town. Jameson is wrapping up things at his clinic so that he can have some time off.”
I gave a long, dramatic sigh.
“If Oliver is willing and offering, just take him up on it. It’s too cold for you to walk to Dina’s and you know it.”
“But that means I have to spend more time with him.”
I was certain if I had been able to see Elsie, there would have been a sly smile on her face as she said, “Maybe that’s not a bad thing.”
“I miss the days where you were cynical about men and relationships,” I quipped.
“Ha! You have no one to blame but yourself for that change of heart.”
I supposed I asked for that. It was thanks to my meddling that my cousin, Jameson, and Elsie had met and fallen in love in the first place.
A dangerous thought crept into my mind. What if Oliver wasmyJameson?
I quickly shut downthattrain of thought. There was no way.
“What’s the worst that could happen, Maya?” Elsie said a moment later. “At the very least, you have a ride to and from work and don’t have to be in the cold. And if you’re lucky there will be…more.”
