Page 1 of Christmas Past
1
On that Wednesday afternoon in mid-December, the Asylum restaurant in Jerome’s Grand Hotel was nearly deserted.
Which was the exact reason why my fiancé Seth McAllister and I had gone there to finalize the menu and the guest list for the reception, to look over the place and compare it to the notes and photos we’d gotten from the florist to make sure that everything was going to line up the way we planned and that there weren’t any last-minute additions or subtractions we needed to make.
After Seth had asked me to marry him almost six months earlier, we’d sat down and discussed exactly what we wanted for a wedding. I’d never been the kind of girl to dream about an extravagant event with ten bridesmaids and dove releases and all the other expensive craziness those sorts of ceremonies generally involved.
To be honest, thanks to my crazy time-traveling magical talent, I hadn’t been sure whether I’d ever find anyone who would put up with me, so it had seemed better to think small and not have too many expectations.
But Seth’s and my adventures in time had bonded us in a way I’d never imagined possible, and once we’d safely landed back in the mid-twenty-first century…my time, even if it hadn’t originally been his…it had pretty much been a foregone conclusion that we would spend the rest of our lives together.
At any rate, we’d both agreed that we wanted to get married in Jerome; he was a McAllister, and his witch clan’s roots went way back here. The crazy little town had become my adopted home as well, even though I was a Wilcox from Flagstaff and had spent my whole life there until recently.
The McAllisters of the present day were his family, too, of course, but his immediate family — his mother and father and older brother Charles — had remained behind in 1926. That was when I’d first met Seth, confused and frightened and not realizing at first exactly how far back in time I’d fallen after I tripped and blacked out in the abandoned mine shaft high above the town.
That was all behind us now, however. I didn’t want to think about the past anymore. No, I just wanted to focus on the future…our future together.
To justify taking up a table at the Asylum, Seth and I had both ordered a glass of wine and an appetizer. A huge Christmas tree glittered in the foyer, and faux pine boughs wrapped with red velvet ribbons decorated the paintings that hung on the main dining room’s wood-paneled walls. Down the hill in the bungalow the two of us shared — he’d owned the house back in 1926 and the current owner, my cousin Margot, had been kind enough to return it to him — we had similar decorations up, although we’d decided against a tree, since we weren’t going to be around much to enjoy it.
The guest list lay on the table in front of Seth, next to the menu for the reception banquet. We’d already agreed that the event should be small and intimate, just my immediate family from Flagstaff and the McAllister cousins we were both close to — my friend Bellamy and her fiancé Marc Trujillo, Brianna McAllister and her significant other, Bill Garrett…who wasn’t quite as human as he looked…along with the clan elders and people like Rachel McAllister, who’d owned the mercantile Seth and I now ran and had turned out to be his long-lost great-niece.
Or was it great-niece, once removed?
This sort of stuff could get awfully complicated when you were dealing with time travel and connections that spanned generations.
All in all, about forty people had been invited. The Asylum honestly wouldn’t accommodate much more than that anyway, which was part of the reason why Seth and I had decided on the restaurant as the venue for both the ceremony and the reception to follow. I knew that Bellamy was planning a big wedding in the spring at the winery she and Marc had bought with her lottery winnings, and I assumed Bree would have a similarly large event at some point, although when asked, she only smiled and said that she and “Bill” — aka Belshegar — were still talking about it but hadn’t hammered out all the details yet.
My mother had tried to gently suggest that Seth and I should have our wedding in Flagstaff, where my cousin Lucas had already offered the reception space at the fancy country club he belonged to, but I’d shot that idea down immediately. Seth was already so far away from the world and the people he’d known that I’d understood from the beginning that we needed to have the wedding in Jerome.
It was my adopted hometown, too, and getting married anywhere else just didn’t make sense.
Now, though, Seth pushed the guest list aside as he reached for his glass of Mule’s Mistake, one of our favorite local wines, and I found myself frowning.
“Everything okay?”
At once, the corners of his mouth turned up. “Sure.”
That smile might have fooled some people, but it didn’t fool me. I saw how it didn’t reach his clear blue eyes, how something about his gaze seemed very far away.
I still thought he was the handsomest man in the world, with his chiseled, boyish features and thick brown hair…but I could also tell when he was trying to hide something from me.
“Seth.”
His gaze moved away from mine, toward the snow-dusted streets of Jerome far below us. The Grand Hotel occupied one of the highest points in town, and the views it offered were spectacular. Snow had fallen the night before, just enough to make the settlement seem like something out of a holiday card, and I hoped it would snow again right around the wedding. Not enough to make travel difficult for anyone, of course, but just the right amount to ensure Jerome looked as magical as I knew it truly was.
What other word could you use for a town that had been a witch clan’s home base for more than a hundred and fifty years?
“Everything looks wonderful,” he said at length, then lifted the glass of wine to his lips so he could take a sip. “I’m really glad we’re having the wedding here.”
“But…?” I probed, and he released a breath before he put the glass back down next to the little plate that held his half-eaten tomato basil bruschetta.
For a long moment, he was silent. Whenever he got like this, I knew he’d probably been wrestling with whatever the issue was for quite a while. We’d had very few hiccups in our relationship, but every once in a while, we hit a bump. Only to be expected, obviously…I didn’t care how perfect a relationship was, sometimes things just weren’t perfectly smooth…but I knew he didn’t want to have any kind of conflict at all because that would force him to admit that he’d left his support system behind. The current-day McAllisters had welcomed him with open arms — obviously, because they were still his relatives, even if separated by generations — but it wasn’t the same as having his parents around, or the people who’d been his friends since childhood.
“It’s okay,” I said quietly. Only two other couples occupied the restaurant at this odd hour of the afternoon, and holiday music drifted from the speakers placed strategically around the room, so I doubted anyone could hear us. Still, I wanted to keep this conversation to ourselves, for obvious reasons. “You know you can tell me anything.”
Seth’s gaze met mine for a moment. I saw the sadness in his eyes, although I didn’t think it was because of anything I’d said or done.
“The wedding is going to be perfect,” he replied. “And I like this venue a lot. It’s definitely the best place in Jerome for this kind of gathering.”
