Page 19 of Grinch Girl

Well now, I should have anticipated this. Carol had calledbothof us to handle this project. Maybe she thought I’d fail on my own. More likely, she was trying to parent-trap us together to repair our broken relationship. But, Carol, despite watching both versions of that movie dozens of times in our childhood, Bella and I were not going to follow the path dictated by Hayley Mills and Lindsay Lohan. No way, no how. My lips pressed into a flat line as Bella gave me a confused frown and raised a tentative hand.

The passenger side of Bella’s car opened, and Nate got out, looking as irritated as I felt. In his arms, he held a laptop anda few file folders.Ah.They must have been working when Carol called, and Bella’s abandonment of the task at hand was causing the tension around his lips and eyes.

I blew out a long breath. The thing was, Bella was far better for this mission than me. Terry had a thing for her in high school. Right now, Bella’s mother was one of the top-performing Realtors on the entire lake, and her mother’s husband worked at an investment bank in Milwaukee. Terry would respect Bella a thousand times more than me.

“You should talk to him,” I said by way of greeting. I jerked my thumb toward Terry’s car. “He’d be much more likely to listen to you.”

“Doubtful,” Bella said. “I could sweet-talk him all day, but Terry’s just going to patronize me while trying to look down my shirt.”

I almost laughed. Bella’s angelic look disguised her realistic way of seeing the world and pithy word choices to sum up what she saw. I’d forgotten that.

I huddled deeper into my leather jacket and slid on a pair of sunglasses that I’d found in the pockets. I wanted the armor of the mirrored lenses against her. It unsettled me to think that she might be remembering me as clearly as I was her. “Well, he thinks I’m trash, and my plan was to charge in there and call him a selfish asshole, so I think your sweet-talking is a better idea.”

Nate looked back and forth between us. “Want me to try?”

To my annoyance, Bella and I laughed in unison. “Bad idea,” she assured him.

Yeah, if a handsome out-of-towner tried to tell Terry anything, he’d probably make admission to the rink free for the entire month of December. “You stay out here,” I warned.

He leaned back against Bella’s car, resigned. “Fine.” He made a shooing motion at Bella. “Go ahead then. The sooner this is over, the sooner we can get back to work. You’re already bookedfor the entire afternoon setting up for tonight’s tree-decorating event. We need some time to work this morning. Please.”

Bella sighed, looking a little guilty for being called out. But there was…relief?…on her face too. Relief to not be working on whatever Nate wanted her to work on? I found that odd. To call Bella a conscientious person was an enormous understatement. Her dedication to her schoolwork, academic clubs, and test scores had been the stuff of Falworth legend. From Greta’s anecdotes, she was apparently the same at college and in her career. So it was weird that she wasn’t one hundred percent dedicated right now to working with her business partner.

Bella squared her shoulders. A pleasant smile formed on her full pink lips, and she walked toward Terry’s office.

As the door closed behind her, Nate opened the car door. I thought he’d sit in there out of the cold, but he just threw his stuff on the seat, shut the door, and came over to me. “Chances of this actually working?” he asked.

“Slim to none. Maybe if we’d known about it before the ad in the paper, Bella could have convinced him. But now?” I shook my head. “Terry’s not going to change his mind when he’s already publicized his free admission. It’s bad business. Terry’s a jerk, but he’s also a solid businessman.”

“So why did you agree to come then?” Nate looked at my face, genuine curiosity in his.

I sighed and threw up my hands. “Who knows? I’m obviously overinvested in this whole situation.” I kept talking truthfully, for some reason, even though I didn’t really want him to repeat this conversation to Bella. “The shop I’ve been running won’t make it through the year without a huge jump in revenue, so I’ll do pretty much anything to try to make things work.”

Nate’s dark eyes furrowed at the edges. “So your participation in the dating show…is that more about the survival of the business or Bella’s himbo?”

I glared at his deliberately provocative language. “Two birds, one stone.”

The sunglasses pinched the bridge of my nose, and I turned back to my car. I wasn’t needed here. Bella would try, fail, and that would be that. I opened the driver’s side door, but just as I was about to climb back in my car, my gaze lit on the mechanicals shed on the side of the rink.

Oooooooh.

I shut the car door quietly and took a meandering stroll to the shed, looking over my shoulder. Because of the angle of the parking lot, the shed couldn’t be seen from the office building, and this section of Wontana didn’t have a lot of drive-by visitors at this time of day.

Despite my web series persona, I wasn’t an actual bad girl. The sneaky new idea that slithered through my brain was not something I would have usually acted on. But I’d heard the weary combination of hurt and anger in Carol’s voice this morning. Why did Terry Oakley have to be such a jerk? If the town of Wontana knew their neighboring town was on the precipice of dying, why would they not make a tiny concession to help us survive?

I lifted my jaw. When they’d announced free admission to the ice, they’d fired the first shot. What I was contemplating was simply an act of self-defense.

I put my hand on the handle of the shed door and gave it a tiny tug. I expected it to be locked tightly, and if it had been, my nasty new plan would have evaporated into the winter morning air. But it swung open easily, and my estimation of Terry’s smarts went down several notches.

“J-Bird?” Nate whispered as I slid into the shed.

“If you keep using that nickname, I’ll kill you and drag your body in here to rot,” I called back.

He ignored my threat and followed me in, turning on the flashlight of his phone to illuminate the dark space. “Are you thinking sabotage?”

I liked a man who could get directly to the point. “Yup.”

I pulled up Google on my phone and tapped a few search items. “Ice rinks are basically all about refrigeration,” I muttered. After I’d done a Geek Squad call at a mansion on the lake with its own backyard rink, I’d been curious and done a little research. I knew the basic science of how they were built and how the equipment worked.

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