Page 51 of Bad Boy Bachelor Christmas
We hadn’t really spoken about that night though. The following morning I’d met her with breakfast at the cabin, and we’d wandered the fields, coffees in hand, until we found a good tree for Justin’s new buyers. I’d marked it to be cut down the day Winter was scheduled to decorate it. We’d joked about our crammed schedule, flirted a bit, and admittedly I fantasized a hell of a lot about all the compromising positions I had put her in the night before.
But that was it.
“I have a couple new ideas of things I want to add to the Velton tree.” Winter stood in front of my hotel room sliding doors, gazing out at a busy city square down below. Christmas decorations hung from lamp posts in the shapes of holly and jingle bells. “Do you think they’ll mind if I throw in some last-minute changes?”
“I trust your judgment. So will they.”
She smiled at me over her shoulder. “That’s the answer I was hoping for.”
Sipping my coffee, I moved to stand beside her. “Have you ever been here before?”
Winter shook her head. “Nope. I haven’t done much traveling, to be honest. After high school I spent a year working to try to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I poured more coffees than I could count every day, and on my breaks I found myself sitting in the back room sketching out ideas of better floorplans and new ways to decorate the café I worked at. My manager suggested I take a design program online, and that spiraled into me finding the degree program at my university. Since then all I’ve had time to do is study and work part time.” She paused to take a slow sip and licked her lips. “This has been a nice change of pace.”
* * *
An hour later, we pulled onto the Velton’s property, an eight-acre plot of land that had been transformed into something akin to Santa’s Village for the holidays. The carnival rides were the first things we saw, with obnoxious flashing lights, ringing bells, and ride operators dressed up like elves in candy-cane-striped leggings and green velvet vests with yellow collars.
Winter sat in the backseat of our town car with her nose practically smooshed against the glass, admiring the sights and seeming to be in awe of it all, even though we’d already been here for two days.
Being with her was like seeing the mundane through new eyes.
We were dropped off as close to the main tree as possible, and Winter shot out of the car, her iPad tucked under one arm. We hurried to the tree, where she immediately engaged in conversation with the general laborers who were hanging the vertical white lights. All the branches had been lopped off on the lower section, as she requested, and when we had gone home at the end of the day yesterday, I’d been scratching my head wondering if this vision of hers was going to come to fruition.
It all looked a bit odd at this stage in the game.
She spoke animatedly with the workers, who all nodded along to what she was saying. I walked a lap around the tree, taking in the sheer size of the beast and the scale of the project I’d put in my intern’s hands. For a newbie, she certainly wasn’t shy about taking risks. Marge had never once proposed dismembering a tree for a client before. She’d probably have thought the suggestion preposterous. Not Winter though. She saw beauty in risk.
I liked that about her.
She put me to work not long after being on site, which was a different change of pace for me. I was used to labor back on the farm, but out in the field like this I was used to being the businessman—not the physical worker. She had me hanging lights, moving her ladder, and standing back to tell her if things looked balanced as she got on the lift and began hanging tripled baubles within the branches.
At first, the collection of large ornaments about the size of her head looked pitifully small on such a big tree. Then a delivery she’d been waiting for arrived, and she added giant silver and gold holly leaves to the groupings of ornaments, which pulled it all together. More deliveries arrived, and so did several other lifts, and together we hung even larger ornaments, more lights, and massive curls of ribbon.
Winter stood back to admire the work at half past four with pursed lips. The sun had nearly gone down, and we were ready to turn the lights on soon.
“It needs more,” she said.
I looked down at her. “More? We’ve been at this for hours. How much more could we possibly get on the thing?”
With a finger now pressed to her pursed lips—lips I couldn’t help but think about kissing again—she turned in a slow circle, her golden gaze falling on the carnival rides. “It needs to be more cohesive. Whimsical. Childlike.”
“And how are you going to do that?”
She grinned. “Carnival prizes. I want to use carnival prizes as ornaments.”
It sounded crazy and not festive at all, but I’d given her control and she was calling the shots. We hurried from ride to ride, collecting prizes from each vendor, and brought them back to stuff into the lower branches just as actors arrived to play the characters she’d envisioned. The Grinch rose up on his lift and stepped onto the scaffold platform that had been built the day before.
Ten minutes later, the Veltons arrived, hand in hand, bundled up in fur-lined coats. Winter invited them to light the tree as the grounds filled up with guests, almost at maximum capacity. With a grin, Mrs. Velton plugged the lights in.
The tree lit up like a spotlight in the dark. Its lights drowned out the surrounding carnival lights, and the Grinch let out a snarl as he shielded his eyes from the glare. Children were laughing and pointing while their parents snapped pictures. One child shot out of the crowd to rush though the vertical lights hanging from the bottom of the tree, and as soon as he disappeared, more children surged forward, followed by their parents and other family members with their phones in hand, already snapping pictures.
Mrs. Velton let out a dreamy sigh. “It’s wonderful.”
Winter clasped her hands under her chin. “You think so?”
“It’s a dream, truly,” Mrs. Velton said. “You captured the heart of our event. North, we want her back next year.”
Winter bounced excitedly on the balls of her feet.
