by Score, Lucy
The ponies in the riding ring eyed the chaos balefully until Fitz, trying to pull himself to standing, accidentally unlatched the gate.
“Hold onto the lead!” Sammy yelled to Jax, who was gaping at the chaos from inside the fence and not paying attention to the dappled gray pony he led or to little Becky Halgren in the saddle. A chicken flapped Beckett right in the face. The little rider gave a high-pitched laugh, startling the pony.
It bolted, with its sticky-fingered novice rider clinging to the saddle, still laughing.
Farmer and fatherly instincts must have alerted John to the potential disaster. He gave up helping Carter drive the cow back into the enclosure and pivoted just in time to pluck Becky from the back of the pony.
“I’ll get the purple sheep,” Sammy called.
“You will? Don’t you want to hear about my Air Jordans?” Ryan asked, but she was already running down the sidewalk. She spotted Eden and Layla sprawled on a park bench, watching the action with popcorn. “Need to borrow this,” Sammy said, snatching the bag of popcorn away from Layla.
“Hey!”
“Sheep on the lam,” she yelled over her shoulder. Ha. She was totally funny.
“Where do you need us?” Eden called after her, springing to her feet.
“Cut between the incense stand and the latkes truck. Try to head it off. I’ll come up on the flank, and we’ll herd it back to the Pierces.”
They split up, and Sammy slipped around the side of Velma Flinthorn’s free-range chicken egg stand. The sheep appeared to be enjoying its freedom and was romping in an enthusiastic zig-zag through the grass and snow. Eden and Layla jumped into its path, startling the sheep. It made a 180-degree turn and loped away from them, heading in Sammy’s direction.
Thinking fast, Sammy stepped out and sprinkled popcorn on the ground in front of her. “Come on, sheep. Come have a snack.” She shook the bag. “Who wants popcorn?”
Thankfully, the purple sheep was feeling peckish. He trotted over and gobbled up the first few kernels.
“Good boy or girl,” she said, unsure of the gender.
“Definitely a boy from this end,” Eden said, eyeing the sheep’s back end.
“Just follow me and the popcorn,” Sammy instructed, sprinkling more kernels onto the ground.
“What do we do now?” Layla asked.
“Walk behind it with your arms out in case he turns around and tries to run,” she told them, shaking the bag and walked backward. “And tell me if I’m going to run into something.
“Watch out for the chicken,” Eden called.
“The what?”
Sammy blinked when the next piece of popcorn was gobbled up by a red hen that elbowed her way into the snack train.
“Is that a Pierce Acres chicken or someone else’s free-range fowl?” Layla wondered.
It took patience and every kernel of popcorn in the bag, but they made it back to the petting zoo with the sheep and the chicken. A grinning Beckett opened the gate, and Sammy dumped the remainder of the popcorn on the ground.
Once everyone was officially corralled, the usually stoic John gave Sammy a hard, one-armed hug. His wife, Phoebe, who had missed the action while sampling mulled wines with her friend Elvira Eustace, gave her a noisy kiss on the forehead.
“What would Blue Moon do without you, Sammy?” Phoebe asked.
Sammy felt her cheeks flush at the praise.
“Nice going, kiddo,” Carter said, ruffling her hair and making her feel even more breathless.
“It was a team effort,” she said modestly to her shoes. The chaos had been quelled, the animals corralled. And the pigtailed Becky Halgren was getting a second, free ride to make up for the first near disaster.
“Thank you, girls, for your heroics. Last time this sheep got out, he wandered halfway to Cleary. Who knew David Bowie was such a huge fan of popcorn?” Phoebe mused.
“Uh. He is?” Sammy asked.
“She named the sheep David Bowie,” John explained, giving the animal a slap on the rump. “You’ve got a hell of a way with animals, Sammy.”
The praise made her feel warm inside.
“You also seem to have a fan,” Phoebe observed, nodding across the park path. There stood cute Ryan still holding two cups of hot chocolate, his hair still in his eye.
“Kid needs a haircut,” John grumbled. Phoebe elbowed him in the gut.
Eden gave Sammy a push in Ryan’s direction. “Go make out with his face.”
Sammy gave the Pierces and her friends a parting glance before crossing to Ryan.
“I saved this for you,” he said, holding up her hot chocolate.
“Thanks,” she said, attempting to wipe the snow and mud off her mittens. She was making more of a mess, so she gave up and stuffed them into her pockets. She accepted the cup and, following Eden’s shooing motions, towed Ryan away from the crowd.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
She shook her head. The sheep chase had actually left her a little sweaty. “I’m fine,” she said.
“Here.” He unwound his scarf and looped it around her neck.
It was so soft and smelled like cologne. She didn’t know what kind of material it was, but it felt expensive. She hoped her sweat wouldn’t ruin it. “Uh. Thanks.”
“You were pretty cool handling those animals,” he told her as they strolled toward the end of the park, leaving the crowd, the smells of lasagna and patchouli incense behind them.
“Thanks. My mom’s a veterinarian,” she explained.
“Cool. My parents own a property management company. They want me to follow in their footsteps and join the family business. But I don’t know.”
Sammy felt a spark of commonality. “I know the feeling,” she said. “Are all parents like that? I mean, is there a rule that says if your kids go to the same college you did or into your profession that means you made the right choices?”
“Whoa, blue eyes. That’s deep,” he teased.
A trickle of sweat worked its way down the back of her neck, and she hoped it wasn’t burning a hole through the scarf. “Uh. So, do you want to go into property management?” she asked, steering the conversation away from any potentially off-putting philosophical questions.
Ryan seemed to be more comfortable when the conversation centered around him. And she felt more comfortable when other people were comfortable.
He shrugged. “It’s okay. But if I do decide to do what they want, I can still do it on my terms, right?”
She stopped abruptly on the path. “Right,” she said, the truth of it hitting her like a bolt of lightning.
As he rambled on about not wanting to work five days a week and shopping allowances, Sammy’s brain turned the idea over.
There was nothing that said she had to go to Ohio State like her mother. Or that she had to use a veterinary career to build a legacy and a reputation. She could do it the way she wanted to. Heck, she didn’t even need to join her mother’s practice. She could practice veterinary medicine anywhere she wanted, and it wouldn’t be because her parents said so.
Maybe, just maybe, she could find a happy medium between rebelling and conforming.
“Oh. Hey. Look at that.”
Sammy followed the direction he pointed. Straight up.
“Mistletoe,” she said, her pulse fluttering. Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy. She forgot all about her potential future and focused on the present moment.
She’d caught the eye of the cute guy, saved a sheep, and potentially solved her own “rebel or conform” debate. And then accidentally wandered into Mistletoe Corner.
It was a secluded little section of the park where a tall spruce wore hundreds of colored Christmas lights. In front of the tree, the Decorating Committee always strung a canopy of lights interspersed with mistletoe plants.
Maybe the Solstice magic wasn’t over yet.
She wet her lips nervously, wondering if she should make the first move. Did she know what the first move was? Should she stand on tiptoe? Tilt h
er head?
Mid-worry about what to do with her hands, Ryan leaned down. That shock of blond hair tumbled across his forehead again. It was the last thing she saw before his lips touched hers.
Her first kiss was utter perfection. Under the mistletoe on a background of Christmas lights. She half-expected it to start snowing in further confirmation of a Solstice miracle.
But instead of fat, falling flakes, she got a shriek of dismay from a tall woman dressed in a puffy, lime green jacket and yellow ski hat.
“Ryan Shufflebottom! You get your fanny over here right now!” The woman stormed into the clearing like a principal about to start doling out detentions.
Sammy jumped back guiltily.
“Uh-oh,” Ryan said.
“Yeah, uh-oh,” the woman agreed. “You’re so grounded. We’re leaving. Now!”
Sammy wished the ground would swallow her up. Was he in trouble because he kissed her? Would he think it was worth the punishment? Or was he already regretting it?
“See you around, blue eyes. Maybe we’ll meet again,” her teenage Lothario said, giving her a little wink and one more hair toss.
She watched as Ryan Shufflebottom from Des Moines was dragged away by his mother, who was reciting the words “military school” like a mantra.
“What the hell just happened?” she wondered out loud.
2
Friday, December 20, present day
* * *
“What in the hell is happening?” Ryan growled as yet another VW Bus cheerily tooted its horn while the driver tossed him a jaunty peace sign. “Stop waving. I don’t know you.”
In his opinion, it was too frigid for friendliness. There was actual snow on the ground. Not the kind of flaky crap that fell from the sky in Christmas movies. But frozen crusts of it, just lying there glistening like icy death traps in the fading afternoon sunlight.
He didn’t bother wondering why he gave the driver a half-hearted wave—despite the fact that his life had imploded, he wasn’t a complete asshole—but he did give passing thought to why this hippie hellhole had so many Volkswagen vans.
It seemed unnatural, as did everything else regarding his current situation. Including the fact that his knees were embedded in his armpits because the last rental car on the lot had been designed as a child’s toy and not for a six-foot-two-inch-tall man.
“Turn right on Dharma Street,” the car’s snooty French GPS voice announced.
Ryan grudgingly took the turn. He was pissed off, unsettled, and several other adjectives along those same lines. The trip had been a whim. He didn’t have whims. He had plans. Goals. Lists. Whims led to situations like this.
After a long-ass cross-country flight, he was careening through upstate New York—which was significantly colder than downtown Seattle in December—in a tuna can of a car heading into the unknown.
Mistake.
He should have spent the day in his comfortable, organized office, meeting with clients, saving them money, building their empires. But as of last week, that was no longer an option. Instead, he was shoehorned into a ridiculous electric car, off to save his great-uncle from whatever trouble he’d gotten himself into—Ryan’s mother had been a little vague on that part.
Meanwhile, back in Seattle, his carefully planned and meticulously executed life was in shambles.
He felt like one of those razed casinos in Las Vegas. One push of a button, and years of hard work gone in an asbestos explosion.
So instead of having his usual dinner at his usual restaurant after his usual ten-hour Friday at work, he was cruising through Blue Fucking Moon’s downtown. Which clearly had its halls decked by elves on hallucinogens.
To his left was the requisite small-town park. Except the normal open space and meandering paths had been replaced with an army of festive inflatables, including but not limited to a red and green peace sign, a ten-foot-tall menorah, and what looked to be a Kwanzaa unity cup.
Signs stabbed into the frozen ground shouted messages like “Oy to the World!” “Have a Cool Yule!” and “Merry Christmas!”
He was scoping out the huge spruce tree draped from top to trunk in thousands of multicolored lights when his phone rang. It took him half a block and three tries before he managed to stab the Answer button on the car’s minuscule touchscreen.
“Yeah?” he snapped.
“Ryan! My favorite nephew,” his great-uncle Carson’s voice wheezed tinnily through the car’s speakers.
They came from a big family. Ryan doubted he was even in the top five of favorite nephews.
“Hey, Carson. I’m almost there,” he said, checking the GPS route. The too-friendly, too-festive town was thinning out and beginning to recede in his rearview mirror. He fervently vowed never to return.
“About that,” Carson said. “I won’t be there to greet you. You can let yourself in. Door’s unlocked.”
“I can wait outside for you,” Ryan insisted, trying to keep the impatience out of his tone. He wasn’t the kind of person who just barged into someone else’s house.
Carson’s cackle echoed inside the pumpkin orange Micro Machine. “You’ll be waiting a long time, boyo! My sister had an emergency. I’m on my way to help.”
Ryan’s frown deepened.
“Turn left immediately,” the French GPS robot announced briskly.
He slammed on the brakes and barely made the turn onto what was apparently some sort of unplowed, rutted path to nowhere.
“You don’t have a sister,” he reminded Carson. It was a big family, but the mandatory attendance of the Annual Shufflebottom Reunion ensured that all of the generations were reasonably familiar with each other.
Now he was going to have to report to his mother that her third favorite uncle was showing signs of mental decline. Fucking great.
“Did I say sister? I meant second cousin on my mother’s side. She’s like a sister me,” Carson said. “Anyway, that’s why I’m on a plane to Boca.”
Ryan came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the lane. “You’re what?” he asked.
“On a plane.”
“I thought you were the one with the emergency,” Ryan reminded him.
He’d flown across the country and rented the world’s stupidest clown car on zero sleep for nothing. He could have been home in sweatpants, halfway through that expensive bottle of whiskey he’d been saving for the special occasion that had never arrived.
“I do have an emergency,” Carson insisted. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t help others. It’s the Blue Moon way. My sister’s emergency—” His uncle’s voice cut off, and Ryan thought he heard someone else murmuring on the other end. “I mean my cousin just broke her… fetlock joint. She’s having surgery.”
Fetlock joint? Ryan was an accountant, not a surgeon. Even so, he was ninety-seven percent certain that the human body was devoid of fetlock joints.
“Okay,” he said, blowing out a breath and counting backward from ten. It wasn’t Carson’s fault he’d gone batshit delusional. “Why did I fly across the country if you’re not even here?”
“Because while I’m helping my cousin, you’ll be helping me,” Carson shouted from the speakers. “I need you to save my farm by Christmas Eve.”
Christmas Eve was four days away.
“That’s not an emergency, Carson,” Ryan said, pinching the bridge of his nose and wondering if this was what an aneurysm felt like. “That’s a damn Christmas movie.”
He’d made the mistake of dating Marsha, a TV Christmas movie enthusiast. It had taken a valiant effort to overlook her obscene love of the campy, predictable entertainment. But her pluses should have evened out that annoying quirk. She was a smart, practical, well-dressed actuary with an impressive retirement account.
On paper, they made sense. However, in real life they just didn’t add up. The entire relationship had been a misstep, putting him a full year behind on his plan to add a partner to his life before he made partner at the firm.
They’d broken up t
hree days before last Christmas Eve when he found her planning the perfect outfit for the surprise Christmas morning proposal she was expecting. Apparently Marsha’s practicality only extended to her career and wardrobe, not her love life.
A ridiculous, romantic proposal after only six months of dating was not in his life plan.
Ryan’s Life Plan
1. Make partner at the firm.
2. Buy a bigger condo with solid resale potential.
3. Find a suitable girlfriend to date for 18-24 months before proposing. Maybe an attorney or a financial advisor. No Christmas movie enthusiasts allowed.
“Christmas movie? You always were a joker,” Carson wheezed.
Ryan had never once in his life been accused of being a joker.
“I’m counting on you, kiddo,” his uncle continued. “I’m in a bit of a financial bind.”
With gritted teeth, Ryan eased the car farther down the lane. Low banks of snow piled up on either side made it difficult to see what was beyond the driveway. He despised not knowing where he was going.
“What kind of trouble? Is some evil real estate developer going to take over your farm and build a bunch of environmentally unfriendly condos?” Sarcasm was Ryan’s second language. He’d seen that movie four times. Or maybe it had been four movies with the same plot line. Either way, they’d all starred one of the actresses from Full House.
“Huh. Yeah. That!” his uncle said cheerfully. “Everything you need is in the house. It’s unlocked. I’m counting on you.”
“Counting on me to what?”
“Save the farm. Save the day. You’re my only hope. Uh-oh. You’re. Breaking. Up. Going through… tunnel.”
This time Ryan very definitely heard someone else hiss in the background. “Not a tunnel, you nincompoop! You’re on a plane.”
“Oh, right. The plane is going through a sky tunnel. Bye!”
The call disconnected at the same moment his headlights cut through the gloom to illuminate a white clapboard farmhouse and a barn that had seen better days. Dusk had fallen like a heavy, wet blanket thanks to an unsettling lack of streetlights.
