The Sleigh Bells Chalet: A Small Town Romance (Christmas House Romances Book 2)

by Jennifer Griffith

  The place was shaping up, but it still had a long way to go.

  The only downside was with the changes, people would see this place in online pictures and they’d flock to its charm. It would no longer be the reclusive retreat he’d specifically asked Freya to book, and it could fill up overnight—and long before Bing’s emotional regrouping effort had … regrouped.

  “You’re only a few steps away from being ready for a grand opening.”

  “Don’t fib. We both know it needs paint.”

  “Yeah, dark purple—with the dark floors—makes it a little …” He shouldn’t say.

  “Tomb-like?”

  “I didn’t want to use that term, but yeah. Maybe it skews more Halloween than Christmas.”

  “Boo!” She poked a finger in his ribs, and he jumped.

  She didn’t mind touching him. Huh. Working side by side with her all these days, that magical feeling he’d sensed on their walking tour through town hadn’t reappeared—but that was obviously because he’d really botched that moment.

  Maybe he could prove his trustworthiness if he kept on an even keel with her again today, and tomorrow, and … however long it took.

  “Why aren’t you using that restaurant?” he asked. It just sat there, looking forlorn through the french doors. “I mean, I’ve never run a hotel, but isn’t a restaurant a chance for a side hustle, more or less?”

  “That’s what I was saying!” Ellery’s mom, marched up. “I wasn’t eavesdropping, I promise. Well, not much.”

  “Mom. We don’t exactly have the capital right now.”

  “It wouldn’t take much. What about something small?” the mom asked. She must really want to do this. “We could do hot cocoa, to stay in theme with the sleigh, at least.”

  “It just takes so much to get things in a kitchen up to code.” She smirked. “And there’s already a very popular hot cocoa shop in town.” Especially popular with Freya, it would seem.

  “But there’s not really a code for hot cocoa, is there?” He couldn’t imagine a code for cocoa. Maybe he could check on that for Ellery. “Or for tea.”

  “Christmas tea!” Mrs. Hart went into a rapture. “People want tea all year round.”

  “Do you want to be the tea maker?”

  If Mom’s eyes had been the lights of a single Christmas tree before, now they were lit up like Times Square. “Me? I’d love that!”

  “Christmas tea sounds great.” Lenny walked up and placed a beefy hand on Ellery’s shoulder. Maybe it shouldn’t have bothered Bing to see another man touch Ellery. He wasn’t dating her or anything.

  But it did.

  “I took home economics in college, you know.” Mrs. Hart tugged on Bing’s sleeve. “I have a knack for making tea.”

  Mrs. Hart’s energy kicked into high gear. Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to get this place done, and she was going to tell every single person there how to do it.

  Bing walked out back toward the shed with Ellery. The yard near the shed smelled like motor oil, not horses. Thank goodness.

  The air out here was bracing, but for some reason, it didn’t bother Bing. Maybe it’s because I’m with Ellery Hart.

  “Looks like you’ve got yourself a Christmas beverage boss.” He hoisted their totes full of staining supplies to put away. “An enthusiastic one.”

  “She will explode this from Christmas tea to wassail, and mulled wine, and spiced apple cider, and trust me. It won’t end.” Ellery swung wide the door to the dim shed.

  “It looks like the idea made her happy, anyway.” The sunlight fell in a shaft into the shed. The entire center was taken up by a gorgeous, vintage open carriage. White-painted with gold leaf, it had the scrolled ends of a Victorian sleigh. Large wooden wheels contained scores of spokes, shiny red paint on each of them. Red velvet tufted upholstery covered the seats.

  And its axle was broken.

  “Yeah, that was my fault.” Ellery leaned against the ladder up to the shelves where they needed to store the wood staining stuff. “Lenny and I managed to load it safely onto the trailer and bring it down here from my Uncle Wilbur’s farm, but when we were unloading, I steered wrong, and the one wheel slipped off the ramps, breaking the axle. Haste makes waste, they say. And they’re right.”

  What a shame. “It’s still pretty. You could park it in front of the hotel as a showpiece.”

  “Yeah, if I had another option for my carriage-ride bookings. I am so toasted on that.”

  Was her obvious stress level the reason she’d been less animated with him? If only he could chalk it up to that idea, and not blame his own history of being a jerk to her.

  Ellery scaled the ladder, which leaned against the wooden shelving. “If I go up, can you hand me the box when I’m at the top? I’ll put it on the shelf.”

  Sure. He could do that. And he could sneak a glance at her form as she climbed.

  What? He was a guy—one who admired a stellar example of the female figure. Ellery definitely had one he could appreciate. Nice curve to her hips, nice sway of them as she climbed, nice—

  “Oh, no!” she squeaked, as the ladder’s feet shifted and it began to tip.

  Bing lunged toward her, planting himself right in the trajectory of her fall. “I’ve got you!” He dropped the tote and put his arms out, cradle style, tensing them for impact.

  Whump! The ladder toppled, and Ellery descended almost slow motion into his embrace.

  Maybe it was an adrenaline effect, like he’d seen in his horses when they heard the starting gun and ran much faster than seemingly possible, but to Bing’s muscles, Ellery was as light as a snowflake.

  He pulled her close to his chest. “Are you all right?”

  She exhaled loudly. “I should ask, are you?” She didn’t climb out of his arms. Her heartbeat pulsed against his chest.

  Bing was fine. The finest he’d been in a while, actually. Her gaze raked his face, and they shared the same steam of breath for a moment before she finally blinked.

  “This floor is covered with stray rusty nails. If you hadn’t caught me, I could have been in the ER for a tetanus shot.”

  Bing couldn’t take his eyes off her to check whether the shed’s floor was in truth cluttered with nails. All he could do was lock his gaze on Ellery Hart’s face, smell her combination of shampoo, dust, and wood stain, and feel the throb of her pulse, which was quickly setting its time with his own.

  “I’ll help you fix the carriage.” His promise outpaced rational thought. So did his next, very dangerous question. “What are you going to use to pull it?”

  She blinked at him, her eyes tightening and then going wide. “Let’s save that conversation for another time.”

  Huh. Maybe this woman really could get him.

  “Deal.”

  Ellery

  Even with the door to the shed wide open and the Old Man Winter free to come and go as he pleased, the air somehow didn’t seem as frigid when Bing was standing beside her.

  The carriage was jacked up and stabilized, after only a few days’ effort.

  It looked good. Really good.

  “The new axles are going to be safer for the passengers,” he patted his handiwork like it was his teenage dream car and not a vintage carriage. “You were smart to change both of them at the same time. The old ones had rusted.”

  On his advice she’d done so. “You do realize that in a way, you’re saying I was smart to follow your sage advice.”

  “If you want to put it that way.” He shrugged. He was so cute when he wasn’t being humble. Or at least he thought he was cute.

  Which made him pretty cute.

  Ever since he’d caught her when she fell from the ladder, something had flipped in her. She’d gone from being wary to trusting him. At least with physical things. He was strong, and he would protect her.

  How long had it been since Ellery had felt even an inkling of that? Greg Maxwell might have made her feel that way, temporarily, but his leaving her at the altar had had a mind-wi
pe effect on any good qualities he may or may not have possessed.

  So, maybe since before her dad died? Wow. That was a long time ago.

  “Should we take it down off its jacks? See if your brilliant skills as a mechanic are as good as you claim—or if you’ve just been a young man fritterin’ away your morning-time, lunchtime, dinnertime, too?”

  “Are you accusing me like Harold Hill accused the kids in River City, Iowa?”

  “Caught that, huh?” No way. Especially when it—embarrassingly—made no sense in context. “I don’t know if we should give the quote five stars for being applicable to the conversation.”

  “No, but it had a rhythmic quality. And this carriage was probably built around the time Harold Hill graduated from the music conservatory at Gary, Indiana.”

  “Class of aught-five.”

  “Gold medal.”

  He knew this stuff. Revelation! Lightning bolts of it. Icicle-falling shards of it. “How do you even—”

  “It’s a gift. And a curse.”

  “Now, that’s not a musical quote.” Everyone knew the TV detective with OCD.

  “Yes. Should we go on?” Bing crouched to loosen the bolt on the jack and crank it down. “For five points. It’s a fine, fine day.”

  She knew this one—Carolina. Howard Keel’s voice was liquid gold. “I’ll say. Because they’re harvesting the hay.” She kind of sang it. Badly.

  He courtesy-laughed.

  Okay, so the man could name tunes from Carolina and quiz her on them. What man in his age group could do that? She had to reach out and steady herself on the shed’s pillar post.

  “Points to you,” he said. “Your turn to test me.”

  She lobbed him an easy one, albeit from a cartoon. “The grass blades are always greener.”

  “In somebody else’s yard—Good Neighbors. But that’s only a one-pointer. Come on, let’s make it a challenge here, Ellery. You can do better than that.” He cranked the jack down more, and the carriage slowly lowered onto its wheels, its springs creaking with a metallic whine. “Ready? Okay here goes for ten points. There’s a prearranged spot in the family plot where my royal bones will go.”

  No way. “You’ve got to be kidding. The Slipper and the Rose?”

  “You only get the points if you can name the next line.”

  She did. Easily. The part about the beautiful family crypt. “Points for me. I’m ahead.”

  “That’s only because you’re sending me the easy ones.”

  “Fine. Twenty points if you can quote the Danny Kaye dialogue about the vessel with the pestle.”

  “I believe you mean the pellet with the poison.”

  “Where, exactly, is the brew that is true? I’d like to know.”

  With a gradually intensifying chemistry, they quoted the entire exchange from the classic movie about a court jester and his mistaken identity. Bing played Danny Kaye’s part, and Ellery filled in all the other lines. Every time one stumbled, the other prompted. It took a while, but they got through the whole thing, even the bit about the flagon with the dragon.

  “Pretty impressive,” was all she dared say or she would have revealed just how little breath remained in her body.

  Bing blinked at her, like he couldn’t believe what had just happened any more than she could. So this was what the phrase sharing a moment meant. Bing’s heart beat closer to hers in this moment than when he’d caught her in her fall from the ladder.

  Holy roasted turkey with all the trimmings. I’ve met my old-movie-quoting male counterpart.

  “So, who gets the point?” he finally said.

  “It was my challenge to you. You get the points.”

  “Maybe we should share them.”

  Maybe we should share everything. She had to fight to keep her heart in check. “If you insist.”

  “Yeah. But we really should keep a running total for future challenges.”

  Bing’s suggestion lit a sparkler inside her. There were going to be future challenges?

  Speaking of quotes, C.S. Lewis once said or wrote something along the lines of it being a wondrous thing to learn there is someone else like us in the world, and that we are not alone. Ellery was much better at quoting movies than philosophers, but the purport of the professor’s quote was palpable as the electricity that zinged in the air of the snow-covered shed.

  Bing broke their gaze and ran a hand over the woodwork of the carriage. “Maybe we should test our work.” Now that it was safely on the ground, they took away the jacks and put them back on their shelves in the shed.

  “It looks absolutely ready to go.” He patted the rim of the door. “Nice job cleaning up the upholstery.”

  “Not quite ready,” she said.

  He looked her way, his brows pushing together like he was going to disagree. “I’ve inspected this thing top to bottom. It’s set.”

  “Yeah, well. Almost everything is set for next weekend. I’ve got ads running online, in the paper, and on fliers in businesses downtown. I’ve set up incentives with local restaurants and the playhouse to run a dinner-theater-hotel deal. To everyone’s shock, I’ve even got a few skiers who booked nights in the upcoming weeks. It’s a miracle. A Black-Friday-crowd-level of miracles.”

  “You don’t sound like you’re surrounded by miracles.”

  “Oh, I should, I know. I mean, look at the massive changes in the hotel that we were able to accomplish in a short time with even shorter funds.”

  “Total miracle. So what’s got you down?” He sounded like he did care. Like George Burns said, once you can fake sincerity, the rest is easy. But was Bing faking?

  Well, his hot-button topic was next. When she’d mentioned it before, he’d gone into full whirling dervish mode—points to her for the Sound of Music reference, even if it was only in her own mind.

  Maybe Ellery shouldn’t broach it, but he looked so earnest. Maybe this time he’d be okay. And time was crunching down on her, and she didn’t have any viable options or anyone with whom to discuss her struggle.

  “Frankly, I’m freaking out. I still have to make a huge investment. It’s why we couldn’t spend any money on the remodeling project.”

  “What kind of investment? I’m great with investments.” He might have been off-quoting Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail, when he offers Meg Ryan advice like going to the mattresses.

  “You probably don’t know anything about this type of thing, so I won’t burden you with it. You’d probably rather not hear.”

  “Try me. I have a surprising breadth of skills.” He winked.

  Flirting! He was flirting with her. Oh, goodness. Well, maybe she could venture into the topic. “I have over two dozen bookings for the carriage. And no horses.”

  A glower appeared instantly. “Oh,” was all he said at first. “I … actually … I’m … horses and I … there’s this history, and …” The glower darkened, to a deep pewter. He fought it, and paced the length of the shed.

  Ellery didn’t interrupt. Clearly, a battle raged inside him, and she didn’t want to get caught in its crossfire. What kind of trauma has he endured?

  Bing came to a stop in front of her at last. He took a breath so deep his belly puffed out big as a Santa suit’s belly. He let it out slowly. Finally, he said, “When it comes to knowing what horses to buy and not buy, I’m great with advice.”

  “You’ve Got Mail.”

  “Ten points—and you’ve got my word. I’ll help you, Ellery.”

  Bing

  What had Bing committed to?

  Tomorrow. Horse shopping. Less than one day off. He couldn’t even postpone the torture! Although postponing the inevitable would actually only prolong the agony.

  The next morning came, and Bing still wasn’t ready. In fact, he was less ready than he’d been yesterday—if that small of a measurement were even possible.

  “I think I’m going to skip it.” Bing paced the length of the executive suite he shared with Freya. Door to closet, closet to nightstand, nights
tand to french doors dividing the two sleeping areas.

  “Skip it?” Freya appeared at the glass doors, swung them open, and gave him the stink eye. “Bing. If you tread that circuit many more times, you’re going to owe your gorgeous brunette friend Ellery new carpeting for this room. You’re wearing a rut in it, dude.”

  Bing plunked his back against the wall, his hip hitting the console where the TV sat, jostling it. “What do you expect me to do? It’s either pace or take a sedative.”

  “You’re the one who promised to help Ellery Hart shop for horses.”

  “Don’t remind me. I was out of my mind at the time. She had this whole lower-lip quivering thing going on, and all I could do was grasp at any way to stop it. She looked so forlorn, Freya. I was victimized.”

  Grabbing a blanket from the end of Bing’s bed, Freya cozied up in the recliner. “If you want my professional opinion, this is the best thing that could have happened to you.”

  “Oh, so you’re saying my having a total freakazoid meltdown in front of the most interesting, attractive woman I’ve met in a decade—or maybe ever—is the best thing that can happen to me? Because I’m dubious as to how that’s a good thing, let alone the best thing.”

  Just like the psych professional cliché Freya could be, she lowered her glasses off her head and peered at him. “You have to face your fears. You can’t run away from them.”

  “Nope. You used that Mother Superior voodoo on me last time. No instant replays.”

  “Then just think about it. You’ve got a massive hang-up going on, what with Snow White and Rose Red.”

  Duh. Except that maybe it wasn’t all due to losing those racehorses. Maybe it was more due to the intense pressure of the business of thoroughbred racing.

  “You’re projecting it onto all horses.”

  Whatever. True. Fine.

  “You’re avoiding being around horses.”

  “Isn’t that why we came to Wilder River? To get me away from work?” From horses, he should have said. And the chance of killing them every time he put them to work.