Page 22 of Wounded Christmas Wolf
“Do you mean me specifically, or me and Dad?”
“Either,” Jace said. After a brief pause, during which she tried to decide how much detail about the daily workings of the farm he actually wanted, he said, “Is it just the two of you?”
“I have four sisters, but none of them live here anymoreexcept for me.” And now that she’d let him know exactly how pathetic she was, Holly leapfrogged on to the rest of his question. “The tree farm does actually need work year round, for replanting trees and whatnot. But yeah, in the summer we grow hay commercially, and lease out some of the fields to a neighbor for grazing their sheep. And we have a you-pick berry bush patch. It’s Dad’s pension that mostly pays the bills, though. The farm itself isn’t really a full-time, year-round business.”
“What do you do, then?” Jace asked, brow furrowing in a slight frown.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if there’s not enough year-round work for two people, but you stay here full-time ...”
“I moved back this fall. I used to live in the city.” Holly glanced down at herself, the old coat sticky with pine sap and the hay-covered jeans. “You’d never know to look at me, but I had an office job and a nice condo.”
“What happened?”
“I got laid off,” she said shortly. She didn’t want to go into how she’d all too quickly run through her savings as she tried to find something else in a tight job market, until finally she had limped home with her wounded ego and a small condo’s worth of stuff. “I got rid of the city place and moved back here to help Dad. It’s been rough on him, being here by himself. We used to run a B&B, but like you saw, it’s pretty empty these days.”
“Not enough customers?” Jace asked.
Holly looked down. “My mom died.”
“Oh.” His voice sounded stilted and a little rough. “I’m sorry.”
She still didn’t have a good response for that. There was no way to brush it off. She’d had lots of experience at responding to well-intentioned compassion, especially in thefirst couple of years after Mom’s passing, but it never got easier. The real answer she wanted to give everyone who told her they were sorry, who offered her their sympathy and prayers and asked if there was anything they could do, was:I don’t want anything from you. I just want my mom back.
But that was the one thing she could never have.
Her eyes prickled. Grief was a guest that grew less intrusive with time, but it never truly left.
“Thank you,” she said. “I, uh ...” She wanted to talk about something else, but based on her earlier attempts to ask Jace about himself, nothing she could bring up was going to result in anything other than grunts and a return to silence that would only fill with her own thoughts.
But Jace surprised her. “My parents are gone too.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago for me.” When she risked a sideways glance at him, now that she was reasonably sure her eyes weren’t going to flood with tears, she saw him looking at her, his gaze soft. “I guess it wasn’t for you.”
“Five years.”
“Not that long.”
“No,” she whispered.
After a moment, his gloved right hand settled on top of hers. His fingers curled a little, not quite holding her hand.
She turned her hand over, offering a hand clasp, but his fingers only curled a little more, as if he didn’t quite want to take what she was offering. It was still more sympathy than she had expected.
An SUV pulled in, all-weather tires crunching on snow. Jace jerked away, and before Holly could say or do anything, he had half-leaped to the far side of the shed to pick up the chainsaw for cutting the trees, leaving his pie half finished.
Holly took a shuddering breath, got herself under control, and looked down at the feeling of somethingtouching her leg. Cupcake, who had been quietly and unobtrusively begging under the folding table, was now standing with his paws on her leg, stretched out in his sock. She was touched that no longer than she’d had him, he already seemed to sense when she was sad.
“It’s all right, sweetheart,” she murmured, ruffling the silky fur around his ears. Looking up, she saw Jace had vanished entirely, taking the chainsaw with him. Suddenly she felt embarrassed all over again. He hadn’t done anything to deserve a feelings dump of all her emotions. They were just chatting about their childhoods, and here she was talking about her late mom. No wonder he had run off.
But the customers were nice, a new-to-the-area family from Bulgaria who were getting their first local Christmas tree, and she had fun helping them pick out a good one.
Jace did not reappear for a while, so she cut and bundled up the tree, but he showed up again to help load it into the family’s SUV.
“I wanted to say that I’m—” Holly began. Then she noticed a pair of ears sticking out of the slightly unzipped top of his light coat, and her weak attempt at an apology dissolved. “Is that my dog in your jacket?”
