Page 73 of The Pumpkin Spice Romance
Come on, Carrie.The smart part of her brain whispered.Have some guts.An entirely different part added.
Buck had brought this to her because he couldn’t just throw a thousand gutted FurrBabies into a dumpster. They were too noticeable. And at retail, they would go for $100 a pop—if she could get them re-stuffed. She didn’t feel like she was really in danger, as long as she did her part and kept her mouth shut. As long as she could help him pull this off, then Buck needed her. He needed strait-laced, goody-goody, never tardy Carrie Smith to solve his problem.
She felt a kind of thrill shoot up her spine.
What could go wrong?Besides everything?the strictly law-abiding little voice in her head asked.Ppssshhh.the reckless new voice replied. Where had following the rules ever gotten her? Even if the cops did come sniffing around, if she sold the evidence, what would they have to go on? Nothing, that’s what.
The brightly-colored gargoyles were still basically new, right? Carrie looked at the pile of empty, no-longer-pristine, clear-front boxes and the floppy, deflated bodies. A gang member gave her a grin showing a jaunty gold tooth and grabbed the full crate to drag it away. A hundred pairs of animatronic eyes suddenly came to life, blinking at Carrie all at once, the beaks moving with a cacophony of gibberish.
Liar, liar, pants on fire,the toys seemed to taunt her. She took a breath and told her conscience to shut up. On Black Friday, people would buy almost anything, and FurrBabies . . . those they would fight over. She simply needed to restuff them.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t just commandeer all the other stuffed animals in the store in a sacrifice to the gods of capitalism. Corporate was expecting her to sell those on Black Friday to pull herself out of the hole she’d dug with the great Halloween snafu. For which she had been completely innocent! It was not her fault that some of Toys-A-Lot’s more exuberant young customers had read Carrie’s Trick-or-Treat flier more literally than intended. Unfortunately, the judge hadn’t seen it that way.
Which reminded her, JoElle’s Crafts was right next door . . .
No. That was as bad an idea as making out with Buck in the backseat of—out of curiosity, whatwashe driving much too fast nowadays?
Anyway,she mentally chastised herself. JoElle’s had to be a last resort. There were other options left, weren’t there?
Carrie nodded decisively and left her station, giving Buck a determined look and a hand signal sayinghold on, before going to the front of the store and dragging Giselle into the back. She pulled a pair of scissors from the utility drawer and said goodbye to the 10-foot-tall gazelle mascot.
An hour later, she had to admit that Giselle hadn’t held as much stuffing as she’d hoped. She’d barely gotten a hundredFurrBabies re-stuffed (most of them looked decent too!) but that wasn’t nearly enough. Only 900-ish more to go.
If only she were still on good terms with Tracey next door, then Carrie could just call her. But after Halloween, the JoElle’s manager had blocked Carrie’s number. It hadn’t helped that Carrie had pointed out Tracey’s own lack of preparedness was partly to blame. When JoElle’s had run out of candy during peak treating hours, it had resulted in a feral pack of junior high boys, hopped up on sugar, running through the craft store, screeching like banshees, and scaring the grandmas, Ethyl and Dorothy, who worked the JoElle’s fabric cutting table into giving them every fall themed candy on display. Carrie didn’t know howshewas to blame fortheirgravely insufficient candy supply. However, she did feel badly about Ethyl’s heart attack. And poor Dorothy never had found her fabric scissors.
The Judge had declared her remorse to be “insufficient,” however, and Carrie, in an ultimate display of non-functioning brain-mouth filter, had justhadto ask how $50,000 would solve anything either. Just like that, it had become $100,000. Now corporate was mad, Carrie’s Toys-A-Lot store was about to go under, and Giselle was down to her wood frame and a pile of fabric. Even if Carriecouldcall Tracey, there was no way the JoElle’s manager would help her, especially after midnight before Thanksgiving Day.
Which reminded Carrie of herotherproblem: she was supposed to bring her signature yam and apple casserole to Thanksgiving at Aunt Melinda’s house tomorrow. She glanced at the clock—it was nearly one. Today. She needed it today.
She groaned. With all this FurrBaby business, she had no time to cook. Add in the crap her family was going to give her about not having a steady boyfriend—didn’t she see how she was torturing her poor mother by not giving her grandbabies?her aunt’s voice was shrill in her memory—and Carrie was dreading Thanksgiving dinner.
Maybe she could claim having the flu. She whispered, “Whatever,” to herself, making a W with her fingers in front of her chest and summoned the ultimate voice of self-confidence and determination—Cher from Clueless.
This was what she had to do: She was going to get these FurrBabies restuffed and repackaged tonight. Then she was going to call every radio station in three counties and get the store ready for the biggest Black Friday sale, likeever. She was going to do what she had to do to save her store. Starting with breaking into JoElle’s Fabric and Crafts.
“You seem to be thinking awfully hard,Cara,” Buck said, coming back around and eyeing both Carrie and the still-boxed FurrBabies piling up at her table. “I remember that look on your face from back in high school, right before you aced a project and totally blew the curve for the rest of us. What’s going on in that cute, nerdy brain of yours?”
“My brain is not cuteornerdy!” Carrie replied and then realized she just sounded pouty. He grinned at her as if she’d just proven his point. Carrie frowned and grabbed the toys, shoving half to each of her neighbors. She ignored their glares and faced Buck, pulling herself up to her full height, which meant she was looking him in the chin. He was annoyingly tall. She was going todo what he wanted, but this was her store and her life. She was in charge.
“I think we need to remember that you came to me because you’ve got a packaging problem.” She reminded him. “Which I’m taking care of so that you don’t have to dump highly recognizable and attention getting evidence somewhere it will totally be found and reported to the police.”
He stiffened, eyes squinting, and opened his mouth, but Carrie summoned Cher, put up her talk-to-the-hand and barreled on. “You need me.”
“You’re going to make a nice profit here too,” he said.
“Correct.” Otherwise, why would she be doing this? “ButI’mthe one who has to make this work, as you pointed out. Missing my family’s Thanksgiving, not that I want to go anyway and hear—never mind. That’s beside the point.” She put her finger up and got herself back on track. Her hand found the curve of her hip. “I was supposed to bring a casserole.”
Wait, that was still not it. His lips quirked up in a smile as if he knew that wasn’t what she’d meant to say.
“And now there’s no way, because those doors,” she waved at the front of the store and checked her watch, “open for Black Friday in twenty-eight hours and it’s not like I need sleep or anything so I can run the insanity that isBlack Friday at a toy store. I’ve got to get thesethingsback to brand new condition,” she waved at the piles of deflated FurrBabies, “get them stocked and priced, get ads on the radio stations ASAP—”
“Ads?” Buck asked in alarm.
“Howdo you think I’m going to get people here to buy these things if no one knows we have them? In summary, formeto take care ofyourproblem, I’ve got to concentrate on my part, which needs to get done pronto. People will believe imperfect packaging on Black Friday when everything’s chaos, but they’ve gotta sellthat day, or they’ll sit till after-Christmas clearance.”
Maybe not. TheywereFurrBabies after all, but she didn’t have to tell him that.
She marched into her office and quickly opened the wall safe, making sure she was blocking any view of the combination from the door where Buck stood watching, and grabbed the petty cash, stuffing it in an envelope and scribbling a note all but illegibly on the front. She stuffed it in her pocket along with a dusty key from the very back of her desk drawer.
