by Cara Malone
That Old Emerald Mountain Magic
A Christmas Lesbian Romance
Cara Malone
Copyright © 2017 by Cara Malone
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
December 16
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
December 17
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
December 18
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
December 19
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
December 20
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
December 21
Chapter 18
December 22
Chapter 19
December 23
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
December 24
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
December 25
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
December 26
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
A Note from Cara
Before you go…
December 16
One
Joy
Joy Turner could feel tears forming in the back of her throat. She wasn’t the crying type, though, so she swallowed hard and pressed her lips into a thin smile as she pulled her best friend, Danny, into a hug.
“You’re going to do great,” she said over his shoulder as she made sure the tears would stay at bay before releasing the embrace. “They’re gonna love you.”
“Yeah?” he asked with a nervous smile. “What makes you so sure?”
“You’ve been playing the guitar since you were twelve years old,” she said, then she rolled her eyes and teased him with, “and you make me listen to you practice every damn night so I know how good you are. Anyway, they wouldn’t have called you if they didn’t know exactly how awesome you are.”
Two nights ago, Joy had been in the middle of brushing her teeth for bed when Danny appeared in the bathroom doorway with the biggest grin on his face, telling her that the front man for The Hero’s Journey had just called and told him to get his butt to Memphis to fill an emergency vacancy. He’d auditioned to join the band six months earlier and been passed over, but they’d just had to fire a guitarist mid-tour and now they wanted Danny.
He hadn’t hesitated to quit his restaurant serving job in town and start packing his bags, and Joy knew that this could be Danny’s big break. Still, she felt a certain amount of foreboding as she saw him off. Danny was her oldest friend, and one of the few that had remained in their little resort town of Emerald Hill after high school was over. Denver was less than an hour away and it had enough of a music scene to keep him satisfied for a while, but deep down, Joy always knew this moment was coming. If the holiday tour went well, The Hero’s Journey would probably offer Danny full membership in the band, and then the chances of him returning to Emerald Hill would be pretty slim.
She felt like she was saying goodbye to him forever.
“I better get in there,” he said, pulling a hastily-packed duffel bag and his guitar case out of the trunk of Joy’s car. “They’ll kill me if I miss my flight.”
“Yeah, that wouldn’t be a good first impression,” Joy agreed, her voice a little shaky. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t be emotional in this moment, and in fact she’d been subconsciously steeling herself for it for quite some time, but it was hard not to think about how much she’d miss her best friend while he was touring the south central United States and living his dream.
“Hey,” he said, picking up on her emotion. “I’ll be back in a few weeks.”
“Sure you will,” she said with a wry smile. She knew that The Hero’s Journey was based in Tennessee, and if he became a member he’d have to move there, too.
For now, Danny shrugged and said, “Hey, all my crap’s still in the apartment so you know I have to come back for it.”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t want to be separated from your framed Die Hard poster for too long,” Joy said with a snort. She’d teased him relentlessly about his choice of décor ever since they moved in together after high school, and in the intervening five years she started to think that he kept that particular relic of his teen years hanging over the living room couch just to spite her.
“That is an American classic,” Danny answered firmly, but he couldn’t keep a straight face. He pulled Joy in for one last hug, his guitar case thumping against her shin, and then he pulled away and said, “Hey, I want the Emerald Hill gossip. Keep me posted on your resort guests’ crazy antics.”
“Of course,” Joy promised.
She’d been working at the Emerald Mountain Ski Resort ever since high school and Christmas time on the picturesque, snowy mountainside was always the busiest time of year. With a fully booked resort always came a few crazies, and Joy would come home from work at night and regale Danny with stories of the strange and extravagant requests they came up with. It wouldn’t be the same this year without him, but she’d find a way to get through it.
“And find yourself a girlfriend,” he said with a wink. “You work too hard.”
“Yeah, right,” Joy said with a roll of her eyes. She’d had a couple of short flings with resort guests over the years, but Danny himself knew how hard it was to find something permanent in a town built around seasonal tourism.
Then Danny turned and walked into the airport, and Joy climbed quickly back into her car. She didn’t want to linger on the sidewalk where her tears would begin to threaten again, and it was too cold to stand outside for long anyway. She could see her breath as she turned her keys in the ignition, rubbing her hands together and trying to get warm again. There were only ten days til Christmas, and that was good news – it meant that Joy would have plenty of work to do at the resort to keep her mind off the very real possibility of losing her best friend.
Her manager had told her at the beginning of the winter season that he saw management potential in her, and that he would have time to mentor her after the holiday rush died down. Of course, Danny’s response when she told him had been to snort and say, “Who wants that? We both need to get out of Emerald Hill and start living our lives.”
He was probably right, and if Joy needed any further kick in the pants to start looking for jobs in places that had a more permanent air then his departure provided that motivation. But change was hard, and she had the holiday rush to get through first.
Two
Carmen
Carmen Castillo was sitting in one corner of a big, velvet-lined booth at The Palms in Manhattan. Her family was flying out to the Emerald Mountain Ski Resort first thing in the morning for a ski holiday that her father had booked, and Carmen was squeezing in a few more hours with her friends before the trip.
“Why Colorado?” her best friend, Brigid, was asking her, shouting over the music in the club. “What’s wrong with Cancun?”
“Nothing,” she said with a sigh.
The Castillos had gone to Cancun every year for the last ten Christmases, ever since her dad’s ‘silly inventions’ turned int
o the not-so-silly source of their vacation funds. That was where Brigid and her family were headed this Christmas, and when Carmen’s dad announced his intention to fly the family to Emerald Hill this year, she realized that she had gotten used to seeing palm trees and sand on Christmas morning. It was a nice respite from the bitter cold of New York winters, and she was missing her lounge chair by the pool already.
“He wants the twins to experience a white Christmas,” she explained. Her sisters, born almost exactly nine months after her dad’s big break, had never seen snow on Christmas day, and Carmen had to admit that there was something a bit more festive about a world blanketed in sparkling, pure white snow than an artificial Christmas tree with a view of the beach. She added with a smirk, “I think he’s gone nostalgic on us.”
She wondered if nostalgia was really the right word, though.
The last time she’d seen snow at Christmas, Carmen had been thirteen years old and her parents had been on the verge of losing the tiny house the three of them cohabited in Massachusetts. Her mother was working ten-hour days as a nurse’s aide and her father had been laid off from his factory job, so he spent his days coming up with invention after invention in the vain hope that one of them would pay off and save the family. They hadn’t had much for Christmas that year, and it wasn’t a memory that any of them had romanticized.
Maybe sentimental was a better word. They were about to spend ten days in a luxury cabin in the mountains, and the twins would end up with a much more idyllic memory of their first Christmas in the snow than Carmen ever had. She wondered if her father was chasing traditional Christmas cheer this year as a way of replacing those impoverished memories with better ones.
“I just can’t imagine choosing snow,” Brigid said, shaking her head sympathetically at Carmen. “If it were up to me, I’d live on the beach year-round.”
“Me too,” shouted a guy’s voice, and then Brigid’s boyfriend, Bentley, slumped into the booth beside her. Carmen rolled her eyes – she wasn’t a fan of Bentley or the influence he’d been having on her best friend lately – and he made a show of kissing Brigid. When their lips finally parted, he said, “Hey babe, whatcha up to?”
“It’s Carmen’s last night in New York,” she said. “I’m just wishing her well on her ski trip into the icy tundra of Colorado.”
“It’s not going to be that bad,” Carmen said with a laugh. “It’s actually warmer in Denver than in New York.”
“You don’t strike me as the outdoors type,” Bentley said, appraising Carmen.
Brigid had picked him up like a virus at the State University of New York and Carmen knew it had been a bad idea to go their separate ways for college. Now they were almost six months post-graduation and she still hadn’t been able to shake him. Bentley was the epitome of a New York trust fund kid, as were most of the people that Carmen spent her days with in her private high school and then at Cornell. Brigid was the exception and it was why Carmen liked her so much, but the longer she dated Bentley, the more he corrupted Brigid and the more Carmen disliked him.
When she didn’t respond right away, preferring to pretend that the music was too loud rather than engaging with him, Bentley added, jabbing Brigid with his elbow, “She’s probably going to turn into Jack Nicholson in The Shining up in those mountains. ‘All work and no play makes Carmen a dull girl.’”
“Yeah, well, at least some of us know how to work,” Carmen said, mumbling the insult under her breath. It would have been so much more satisfying to say it loud enough for Bentley to hear, but as much as she wished Brigid would see his spoiled rich kid attitude for what it was, she couldn’t bring herself to be outright cruel – ahem, honest – to her best friend’s boyfriend right in front of her. Out loud she said, “I’m going to get another drink. Anyone need a refill?”
“No,” Brigid said, pointing to the half-filled vodka cranberry sitting on the table in front of her. Then Bentley wrapped his arms around her and they resumed their exaggerated public display of affection, his tongue snaking into her mouth before Carmen turned away.
The club was crowded as usual and it took her a while to get over to the bar. She didn’t even care about getting a drink – she just needed to get out of that booth for a minute. Carmen hadn’t noticed the change coming over her best friend right away. It had been subtle, but the longer Bentley stuck around, the more Brigid had begun to match his shallow, materialistic and self-centered personality. Worst of all, it was rare to get through an evening without him popping up wherever they were. Even though Carmen had tried to broach the subject delicately with Brigid a few times (“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’re dating an asshole,” hadn’t seemed quite right, but, “Do you really like that Bentley guy?” hadn’t gotten the message across either) it never seemed to help and she felt increasingly sure that she was losing her best friend to the vapid rich kid crowd.
While Carmen was waiting for her turn to catch the bartender’s attention, a guy with slicked-back hair and a designer suit jacket slid up to the bar beside her.
“Hey,” he shouted to her over the music. “Busy night.”
“Yeah,” she answered distractedly, trying to keep her eye on the bartender, otherwise she knew she’d be standing here all night.
The guy leaned over the bar the next time the bartender walked past and managed to flag him down. Then he turned to Carmen and said with a toothy grin, “What are you drinking, sweetheart?”
“Oh,” she said, feeling her cheeks beginning to burn. “It’s okay, I’ll get my own drink.”
“No strings attached,” he said, still smiling at her. She knew this wasn’t exactly true – no man has ever bought a girl a drink without any expectations – but he seemed good-natured, and she knew the chances of flagging the bartender down again were slim, so she gave him her drink order.
“Thanks,” she said, and then because they had to kill the time until the bartender came back with their orders, she said, “How’s your night going?”
“Better now that you’re here,” he answered in the typically cliché fashion of most of the men she met in clubs like this. His eyes made a quick sweep over her – unfortunately not quick enough to avoid detection, and she couldn’t wait to get her drink and make her way back to Brigid.
Carmen tried to dress as conservatively as she could in places like this to avoid interactions like the one she was currently having. Tonight she was wearing a black dress with long sleeves and a high neckline, the most clothing one could get away with wearing to a club in Manhattan, even if it was December. Meanwhile Brigid’s wardrobe had grown increasingly skimpy ever since the advent of Bentley, as if she had to continually convince him that he was still interested in her – another strike against him in Carmen’s mind.
“I appreciate that,” Carmen said. “But you’re not my type.”
She’d become somewhat of an expert at deflecting unwanted advances ever since Brigid had endeavored to immerse herself in the club scene – Carmen, on the other hand, would take a good coffee shop over this place any day.
“Tall, dark and handsome?” he asked, still grinning at her.
Thankfully the bartender returned at long last with her martini and his scotch on the rocks. Carmen pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of the slim purse slung over her shoulder and threw it on the bar. It was the smallest bill she had, but she found it well worth leaving a generous tip to extract herself from this uncomfortable moment.
“Male,” Carmen answered, and then slipped into the crowd without waiting for his reaction. If she knew anything about the guys who hung around clubs trying to pick up women, he would simply stay by the bar until another girl needed a drink and play the whole scene over again until one of them thought that he really was tall, dark and handsome.
When she got back to the booth, Brigid and Bentley were still completely absorbed in each other and it looked like Carmen had lost the attention of her best friend for the night. She could have sat back down and watched herself bec
ome the third wheel, or she could have tried to mingle on the dance floor, but this wasn’t her scene and she had an early flight to catch. So instead, she set one of the most expensive martinis she’d ever ordered down on the table and shouted over the music, “Hey, I got you a martini. I think I’m going to head home.”
“Already?” Brigid asked, genuine alarm in her voice. She popped up from the booth and pulled Carmen aside, talking to her confidentially. “It’s not because Bentley’s here, is it?”
Carmen didn’t have the heart to tell her that it definitely had to do with Bentley’s presence – not mere hours before they would be separated for almost two weeks. So she shook her head and said, “No, I’m just tired, and I still need to pack a few things for the plane.”
“Oh, okay,” Brigid said. “Well, call me when you get into Denver, and take lots of pictures.”
“Try not to freeze solid,” Bentley shouted from where he was spread out in the booth.
“Yeah, thanks for your concern,” Carmen said.
“We’ll send you pictures from Cancun,” he said, “so you don’t feel too left out.”
