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

by Jennifer Griffith

  This was crucial, obviously, but she had no clue where to even start. “What would you suggest?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Experience riding, temperament, experience with teams? Knowledge of how to put them in harness?” He went on a question-listing tear.

  “Whoa, my friend. Is this your way of saying you want to sit in on the interviews?” If he would, that would take so much pressure off her—and cut down the fear of the unknown by a huge amount.

  He didn’t answer at first, but finally he said, “Donner and Blitzen are pretty special. You can’t have just anyone taking charge of them. You’re going to want to see your top picks interact with the horses, as well—and keep a close eye on that.”

  All good points. All points she’d never have known without his advice.

  “Okay, Mr. Horse-Knowledge. If you’ve got time tomorrow afternoon, I’ll put your name in ink as the second interviewer.”

  “Time?” he grinned. “Mr. Horse-Knowledge is on vacation, remember? He’s got nothing but time.”

  Maybe, but Ellery was starting to see that Bing Whitmore possessed a lot more than mere time.

  And all those qualities were starting to become irresistible—even though he was a guest in her grandpa’s hotel.

  Bing

  “She bought the horses I recommended.” Bing paced between the tables of the mostly empty bistro. Soon the dinner crowd would come in, and he’d have to stop, but for now, he weaved his way between three nearby tables. “I might have spent her into the grave.”

  “Why didn’t you just spring for the team?” Freya turned on her bar stool. “You could probably buy your sweetheart hotel owner five crack carriage-pulling teams and not even see a blip in your monthly budget.”

  True. Bing could have sprung for a dozen teams for Ellery Hart and her carriage venture without batting an eye. Grandpa’s thoroughbred legacy wasn’t anyone’s idea of chump change. “Ellery Hart wants to be self-sufficient.” She’d even said so.

  “Maybe she claims that, but most girls want to be taken care of.”

  Not this one. At least that wasn’t how he read her. “I can give her advice, but not the team.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s going to come out of this brush with financial death victorious—on her own. If I give her stuff, then it cheapens her triumph. Ellery Hart deserves all the thrills of that victory.”

  Freya nodded, like she knew his deepest secret. “I see. You’re saying Ellery Hart deserves everything good.”

  “Precisely.” Bing started pacing through the chairs and tables again. I want Ellery to have all the good things she deserves. Am I the man to give them to her?

  “What about the best carriage driver in a hundred-mile radius? Does she deserve that?”

  “Of course.”

  “By that you know I mean you, right?”

  Bing bumped a table with his thigh, tipping a sugar shaker. “Shopping for a horse team is one thing.” He righted the sugar shaker, but it kept toppling. “Actually driving the carriage is a lot more interaction.”

  “Right.” Freya’s elongated i in right always rubbed him wrong.

  “Look, Freya, I’m making progress. But I’m not there yet.”

  Freya gave a little excited golf clap. “Oh, listen to you using that hope-filled adverb: yet.” Freya stood and tugged him over to her table, where she pushed a bowl of soup at him.

  He stared into the bowl, like it was tea leaves and held all the answers. Finally he lifted a spoon to take a bite.

  “Does this yet word mean that you think sometime you’re going to be okay to come back to your life again? I have some clients who are tired of meeting over the internet.”

  The soup was good. Minestrone with extra oregano. “What it means is I’m done shopping for a team, and I’m not driving her carriage.”

  But was that all it meant? Something about Ellery’s brief kiss on his cheek had cracked through his hard candy shell. Okay, it probably wasn’t a candy shell. And he was more cayenne than milk chocolate on the inside. Except around horses, when he became marshmallow fluff.

  Oh, what was with the snack analogies? He shook them off and unwrapped a cellophane packet of saltines to counteract the sugary dumbness.

  “Fact is,” Freya said between gulps of her beverage, “that in the psychology world we’d say you accomplished something major today. You’re the one who should be taking the victory lap.”

  “Me?”

  “You faced down a situation fraught with triggers. And you didn’t buckle.”

  Yeah. Okay. Maybe she was right. He’d manned up, for sure. “Fine. Good. This calls for a celebration dinner.”

  “Yes!” She reached over and pushed his arm. “Now you’re getting the idea, cousin.”

  “Where do you want to go? There’s a steak place up by the ski slopes I hear has a mean prime rib and the world’s best homemade bread.”

  “You know I love a good cut of meat, but sorry. Not tonight, pal.”

  Uh, was she blowing him off the second she’d set him up for inviting her to dinner? “Uh, aren’t you the one who suggested a celebration?”

  “Sure, but I’ve got a date. And so should you.”

  “A date! With whom?”

  “With Ellery Hart, duh.” Freya drained her glass and set it down with finality. “Why are you even asking that? You want her so much you can hardly breathe. It’s getting ridiculous to watch you dance around your palpable ache for her. Just take her on a date and kiss the living daylights out of her already.”

  “I meant who is your date? Geez. And let’s keep the living daylights safely inside Ellery Hart. She has a lot to accomplish in the next few weeks, and she wouldn’t want to miss it.”

  “See? You’re already putting her needs and wishes higher than your own on your priority list. It’s so sweet.” She hung on the e in sweet, just to mock him. He crumbled three saltines and threatened to toss them in her hair. “Hey, knock it off.” Freya shooed his hand away. “And my date is with the hot bartender in the hot chocolate shop. We’re going off to do hot yoga.”

  “Hot bartender, hot chocolate, hot yoga. Aren’t you going to overheat?”

  “Oh, I sincerely hope so.” Freya shook the ice in her glass. “In a chaste and moral way, of course. I’m possibly his shipoopi.”

  “Third date kisser. Got it.” He subtracted points from Freya’s score for reusing too many Music Man quotes and not branching out to other musicals. “At least you’re not a girl who cain’t say no.” There, he mixed it up with Oklahoma.

  Although, he’d used that musical with Ellery yesterday in the surrey with the fringe on top reference.

  Ellery was creaming him in the movie-quoting scoreboards. He needed to catch up with her.

  Maybe over dinner.

  No sense celebrating his victory by eating alone. Even if he couldn’t exactly explain to Ellery why it was a victory dinner.

  “Fine. I’ll call her.”

  “It’s about dang time.” Freya air-kissed his cheek and headed out of the bistro to prep for her hot, hot, hot date.

  Bing dialed Ellery, but he got no answer. He ate a few bites of his soup, but it was cold now. Before he could take it to the counter and ask for them to heat it up in a microwave somewhere, up walked Ellery.

  “Hey, what are you doing downtown? Did you know how to find me? I was just trying to call you.”

  “What for?” She handed a credit card to the cashier, who gave her a stack of Styrofoam take-out boxes in a sack. “I had my phone off while I was in a staff meeting powwowing on grand-opening strategies. I promised them lunch, so I’ve got to get this stuff back, or Lenny’s stomach will stop merely threatening with its growls and actually break out and attack us all. Sorry. What’s going on?”

  “Would you like to go to dinner with me to celebrate—er, buying Donner and Blitzen?”

  “Like, as in … a date?”

  Sure, of course a date. “Is that not kosher?”


  “Um, you’re a guest at my hotel.”

  “Is there some kind of ethical rule against dating a guest? I mean, I’ve heard of boss-secretary concerns, but never anything to worry about in this situation.” Was he putting too much pressure on her? “If you like, we can call it a business dinner. Or even an appointment, if that’s better.”

  “Well”—she looked at her shoes and then back at him—“I guess that would be okay. As long as we keep it professional.”

  “Why wouldn’t we?” Other than the fact that Freya was a hundred percent accurate in her assessment of his aching desire for this woman. Every little thing she did was magic, and a British pop song from the early eighties could quote him on that. “I’m completely professional.”

  “A professional what? I don’t even know what your job is.”

  Maybe they should discuss that over dinner. “I’m buying. Do you like prime rib?”

  “More than practically anything else in the whole world!” She laughed. “But that’s an obscure quote. If you can get it, that’s an automatic win for you and game-ender.”

  He wasn’t ready to end the game, so he didn’t say he recognized the quote from the 1995 wry British comedy Cold Comfort Farm. “No idea.”

  “Never mind. I do love prime rib, and I’m starving. Buying horses is hungry business.” She took her card back, and the cashier handed her the bagged meals.

  “Want a ride?”

  She did want a ride. Bing drove them up to the ski resort area, and pulled into the parking lot of the hotel again.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” he said as he went upstairs to make a reservation at Optimus Prime Rib. Even if it was only a so-called appointment in her mind.

  Come on, it was a date.

  ∞∞∞

  He couldn’t have chosen a better restaurant if he’d lived in the area all his life and done extensive testing. Outside the place, the mesquite smoke from the grill permeated the air. This was going to be good.

  Inside, the romantic ambience was perfect: ski lodge with windows practically to the sky, table for two with a view of twilight on the slopes, the snow faintly pink—just like the blush on Ellery’s cheek and the color of her v-neck sweater.

  A candle flickered between them, surrounded by some holiday greenery, and the cathedral-ceilinged room smelled faintly like the bonfire burning in the giant, stacked-stone hearth a short distance away.

  “You come here often?” It was the cheesiest line known to man. Why was he suddenly awkward?

  “On all my non-dates, naturally.” She perused the menu.

  Date equals awkward. That had to be his problem. Maybe he should think of it as an appointment, too, just to reclaim his chill, manly vibe.

  “Congratulations on becoming an official owner of a horse.” He lifted his water glass, and she toasted. “It’s a great way to live.”

  “I’ll soon find out.”

  Great. She hadn’t taken his hint. He’d have to lay it on heavier if he were going to be candid with her about his job. “Did you ever have a different job, like, before taking the reins at the Sleigh Bells Chalet?”

  “I see what you did there. Reins? Good one.” She toasted to that one, too. Good thing they only had water. At this rate they could be tipsy before they even received the basket of bread. “Yes, I spent a couple of years in an accounting firm in a city called Reedsville.”

  “That’s not far from where I live. Together with Torrey Junction, Reedsville, and my town—Massey Falls—the three cities make a triangle.”

  “Massey Falls, huh?”

  “Heard of it?”

  “It sounds familiar. I spent a lot of time with my face in a ledger.”

  “What brought you back to Wilder River from there?” He was getting nowhere. She hadn’t picked up on his vague allusion to the Torrey Stakes racetrack, so he couldn’t segue into his profession. Did she really not want to know? Maybe this was actually a business dinner in her mind. Nothing personal. “Did you come back to work at the hotel?”

  “Uh, no.” She looked out the window at the ski slopes. Lights came on along the cables of the lift. They sparkled against the snow. “I came back for a guy. I know, I know. It’s a total cliché. Quit your job and move across borders to chase your high school sweetheart.”

  “I take it things didn’t go as planned.”

  “Oh, they went exactly as I always dreamed—at first. Right up until the wedding day. Me in my gorgeous dress, in the veil with the little satin rosettes studded with pearls. Unfortunately, Greg Maxwell never made it to the church.”

  Whoa. Stood up—like, on the day of days. “That completely reeks. I’m talking, potatoes-gone-bad-under-the-sink-for-a-month reeks.”

  She stared at him for a while, a bunch of emotions fleeting across her face, none of which he could precisely pinpoint. At least one was pain. Another was relief. “Yeah. Reeks pretty much covers it.”

  “Where did he go instead?”

  “Besides to the fiery blazes according to all my ranting days after the wedding? Besides not to the bank to pay me back for all the money I blew on said-wedding? I don’t really know. I wish it had been to personality and life-choice rehab—but before I’d taken his ring.”

  “In a way, sounds like that was a narrow escape.”

  “I like that phrase better than close call.” She drank another swig from her water glass, crunching the ice. “What about you? Any close calls or narrow escapes?”

  Now. He might as well tell her now. “Just with a couple of females I may never get over.”

  “Oh.” She set her glass down, and then smoothed her napkin on her lap a few times. “That’s sad to hear.”

  “It’s even sadder if you know they’re both fillies.”

  “Fillies.” She blinked.

  “I mean actual fillies, not some weird teenage-cowboy moniker for a young woman.” He was rambling. He’d better nail his point now or he was never going to. “One was a thoroughbred racehorse named Snow White. She won the Torrey Stakes last May, right after winning two other big races. She was Whitmore Stables’ best hope for getting into the larger circuit, along the lines of Belmont or the Preakness.”

  “Was? You’re using the past tense.”

  “Six weeks after her amazing win, and right before we were set to transport her to another big win, she fell. Tumbled, really. Broke her leg during a regular canter around the track. It was so unexpected, not even in racing mode.” His voice was tight, and he knew it, and he didn’t know how to loosen it up. “They couldn’t save her.”

  “Were … were you the one riding her at the time?”

  It was a detail he never, ever mentioned. Not even to family. They all just assumed one of the stable’s horse trainers had been on Snow White during the fall, but Ellery Hart had divined his true source of pain in an instant. He closed his eyes and gave his shallowest nod.

  In a split second, her hand had shot across the table and encompassed his, pressing hard, imbuing him with a tenderness and a compassion he hadn’t felt from anyone—not even himself—in months. That grasp suffused his whole being. A dark ghost detached itself from somewhere inside his ribcage and floated up into the rafters, and then out into the dimming night.

  “You must have been tortured by that.”

  “It would have been easier to get over if—” He knew it would sound melodramatic to tell her the second part of the story. It would sound like he was making it up.

  “No, something like that stays with you for, well, forever. You loved that horse. I get it now that you could see that love—or the lack of it—in the eyes of that farmer selling us those white horses. It’s clear as a church bell on Christmas morning that Snow White meant everything to you.”

  “I did love her. Not just for her potential as a racehorse. For her soul.” His ankle still smarted from the accident. The tossing of luggage and jumping out of the back of his truck onto the ground on the day he and Freya had arrived in Wilder River hadn’t been the source of his
sprain, but it had definitely renewed it.

  So, yeah. He’d been a little snippy about the situation. Not that he should be making excuses for bad behavior, but he had one, if anyone ever asked.

  “I’m sorry. How have you handled the loss?”

  “Well, at first, she had a potential successor by the name of Rose Red.”

  “Had? Again with the past tense? Tell me she didn’t die, too!” Ellery clutched her heart with both hands, her dark brown eyes flying wide. “Oh, no. Please.”

  “Rose Red is alive.”

  Ellery’s smile grew, and then faded. Her shoulders fell. “But from the way you stated it, I take it something happened to her.”

  “In a freak, repeat accident, Rose Red also had a fall. Not the same way. She was in a timed trial race at the track, being ridden by one of the stable’s trainers.”

  “Not you this time.”

  No, he hadn’t been on a horse. Not since Snow White. He shook his head. “But her leg broke as well. Fortunately, a young country vet was able to set it soon enough that her life was spared. Of course she won’t ever race.”

  “But at least she’s alive.”

  Yeah. That mattered. A lot. He was so grateful to Dr. Wilson for taking a risk and saving Rose Red, at least for a while. The horse’s life would always be tenuous.

  “Do you miss her?” Ellery whispered.

  “Every single day.” He looked at his plate. “The world is emptier without Snow White in it.” He turned his hand over and interlaced his fingers with Ellery’s. They fit nicely.

  Perfectly.

  Being able to tell someone about this, someone who really seemed to get his emotional investment—and didn’t just try to psychoanalyze him, thank you very little, Freya—loosened tight knots all over inside his being. Ellery Hart was slowly and surely taking possession of his heart.

  One of the fire’s logs crackled, cracked, and fell, sending sparks up the chimney flue, in nature’s echo of the sparks flying up through Bing’s body. Every second that he shared sensory contact with Ellery, those sparks ignited more and more little corners of his soul.

  I could burst into full-on conflagration at this rate.