by Jessi Gage
Cover Copy
Mandy never planned to return to Newburgh, New Hampshire, the hometown that unfairly branded her a slut, but she has no choice. Her father has died, and she'll be spending Christmas settling his affairs. She hopes to get in and out of town without attracting the looks of disgust that drove her away, but when a certain Oakley-wearing, Harley-riding cop starts hanging around, an old crush is revived and the rumor mill restarts with a vengeance.
Cole has always been attracted to Mandy, but he has never acted on it. Besides being sixteen years older than her, he was friends with her father. The rumors people in town spread about her were bad enough without an inappropriate relationship adding fuel to the fire. But when Mandy returns to Newburgh fully adult and looking more gorgeous than ever, he can’t keep his distance, especially when an old secret of her father’s surfaces and puts her in danger. He’ll stop at nothing to protect her, but convincing her to stay in Newburgh, with him, will take a Christmas miracle.
Reader Advisory: Contains references to a past sexual assault
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He cupped her chin and made her look at him, even if they couldn’t see each other in the dark. “What did he do after?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you freaked out. What did your boyfriend do after that?”
Tension straightened her shoulders. “What any decent guy would do. We stopped. He stopped. He was a perfect gentleman.”
He scoffed.
“What? He was. I was a total spaz and he was cool about it.”
“He was cool about it?”
“What? What’s that superior tone for?” She was getting angry. He loved that about her. She’d stood up to Tooley a few days ago. She was standing up to him now. If she didn’t like something, she let you know about it. Now that was a characteristic he could believe she’d gotten from Gripper.
“You said you freaked like always when things get to a certain point, that you always blow it. You think you blew it with that guy because a single attempt at second base went poorly. I meant what happened afterwards? Was there a conversation? A second attempt after you had some time to process what happened? A third?”
“What guy would want to try again after something like that?”
“This guy would.”
Cole in My Stocking
By Jessi Gage
Dedication
To my dad
Acknowledgements
Thank you, Julie Brannagh and Amy Raby. Your friendship keeps me sane. Your critiques make me a better writer. Thank you, Mom and Kate, for your mad proof-reading and babysitting skills. John Hayes, thank you for many a stimulating conversation over coffee, for proof-reading, and for advising me on gun issues. Piper Denna, I love working with you when editing time comes around. You have an eagle eye and you make me laugh.
As always, thank you, Shane, for encouraging me, loving me, being an awesome daddy to our kiddos, and making our home a wonderful place to live and write.
Chapter 1
Welcome to Newburgh, the sign said as I trundled down Main Street into my old home town. No thank you, my 1997 Chevy Blazer insisted as the sudden thump-thump-thump-thump of a flat tire forced me to pull onto the slushy shoulder. I knew how “the beast” felt. I didn’t want to be here, either.
Six years ago, I’d floored it out of town the second I’d received confirmation of meeting Grayson Regional High School’s graduation requirements. I hadn’t even stuck around for the ceremony. Who needed a silly black hat souvenir, anyway? All I’d cared about was the diploma, and that had graced my summer-term dorm mailbox a few weeks later. It had been the last piece of correspondence I’d bothered opening from Newburgh, New Hampshire until the letter that arrived yesterday by courier.
The one announcing my father had passed away.
Lung cancer, his lawyer informed me when I called the number on the letterhead. I hadn’t even known Dad was sick.
He’d been 57. When I’d left, he’d been a pack-a-day smoker, not to mention a six-pack-a-day drinker of cheap beer. It hadn’t been a shock to learn he’d gotten sick. It was always going to be either his lungs or his liver that did him in. Looked like lungs had won the coin toss. What did surprise me was how soon it had happened. And the way my stomach did a roll when I read the news. It had taken me an hour of kickboxing and a five-mile run to identify the feeling as sadness. My father had died. I was sad. Go figure.
He hadn’t been a great father. But he hadn’t been a terrible one either, considering. A wartime veteran with psychological scars that manifested in verbally abusive behavior and a widower whose wife—my mom—had died in a car accident when I was little, he’d done the best he could with what he’d had to work with. At least that’s what I told myself on good days.
I hadn’t talked to him in six years, but I’d kept up with Christmas and birthday cards. I always included a picture or two of myself and a letter about what I’d been up to. He never wrote back. I hadn’t really expected him to. Our relationship had ended a long time before I’d left home.
This year’s Christmas card was either squished into Dad’s mailbox alongside several days’ worth of junk mail and bills or it would be soon. I’d sent it two days before learning of his death. How strange to think I’d sent my father a card he would never receive. The act felt unfinished, like cracking open a can of soda pop and leaving it on the counter, never to be consumed.
Maybe I could find the card and put it in his coffin on Wednesday. People did sappy things like that at funerals, didn’t they? I wasn’t sure. Except for my mother’s funeral when I was too young to remember much detail, I hadn’t been to one before, only seen them on TV or in movies. Somehow I doubted Dad’s funeral would feature a wise-cracking sitcom wife or a dramatic big reveal to make all the guests gasp. There would be cops in attendance. That much I knew, since Dad had been friends with all the guys on Newburgh’s police force, especially Chief Tooley. Some of the clients whose guns Dad had fixed as Rockingham County’s premiere gunsmith would likely show as well.
I imagined a somber gathering of taciturn hunters and hard-faced cops, each sticking to their respective sides of the chapel. Maybe Dad’s sister, my Aunt Kelly, would show up. I’d looked her up on Facebook and made sure she’d gotten an invitation. She hadn’t responded.
One thing was for sure. I wouldn’t be making it to a Christmas Eve funeral six days from now if I froze to death on the side of the road. My boots splashed in a dirty soup of snow and sludge as I hopped from the beast and dug the requisite tire-changing paraphernalia from beneath my luggage in the back.
I understood the principle of changing a tire, but I’d never had to do it before. After sweating through my turtleneck beneath my down jacket, I’d managed to jack up the beast and remove the five lug nuts. That was supposed to be the hard part, or so I’d thought until I found myself at an impasse with the wheel. It wouldn’t budge. I yanked, pulled slow and steady, kicked, searched for the non-existent owner’s manual in the glove compartment, kicked some more. Nothing worked.
It was nearing midnight when I finally conceded defeat. My chances of changing the tire on my own were about as good as my chances of getting in and out of Newburgh without anyone calling me trailer trash. Which was to say, slim to none.
Lamenting my lack of AAA membership, I trudged back to the driver’s side door and climbed in. My best friend Heather had given me a heated seat pad for the trip. I nestled into the welcoming warmth and fished my insurance card out of my wallet. I was pretty sure my insurance company provided roadside assistance. But would it make my rates go up if I used it? Surely not. I hadn’t gotten in an accident. It was just a stupid flat. Living in downtown Philly on a soci
al worker’s salary, I could barely afford to keep the beast in Valvoline oil and low-grade gasoline. Higher insurance rates were out of the question.
Hoping for the best, I dialed the 800 number. A sharp knock on the window made me yelp.
My phone clattered into the inaccessible abyss between my seat and the console. I’d lost countless spare change, ChapSticks and morsels of Chex Mix to that abyss. If anyone ever plumbed its depths, they’d be sure to find fossilized remains of lost species of gas station foods and thriving colonies of automotive dust bunnies.
And my cell phone. Crap.
I turned the full force of my scowl on the perpetrator, forgetting to be fearful until the height and breadth of the person registered.
A man. Crowding my window and blotting out the light of a faraway streetlamp. Panic made a fist around my heart.
I slammed down the door lock with one hand while feeling for my cell phone with the other. Duh. Empty cup holder. Nine-one-one was not an option.
Meanwhile, my eyeballs strained to make out the man’s face, and I realized why it was so difficult. The wide brim of a tan state trooper hat left all but the man’s square chin and firm mouth, which was surrounded by five-o’clock-plus-two-extra-days stubble, in shadow. That mouth was as unforgiving as rebar. When it moved with a glass-muffled “Everything all right?” it offered a glimpse of slightly crooked lower teeth.
I knew those teeth. That mouth. That chin with the faintest of dimples in the center.
It had been so long.
The knot of panic in my chest morphed into mortification. Of all the people I’d planned to avoid on this trip, Cole Plankitt topped the list.
I wanted to curl into a ball and become invisible. Instead, I pressed the button to lower the window. “Flat tire,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t recognize me.
It wasn’t an idle hope. On my way to Newburgh, I’d stopped at the Shaw’s in Plaistow for groceries to stock Dad’s fridge. My checker had been a friend in high school. Shelly Winger. She hadn’t recognized me. Not only had it been six years, but I looked different than I used to. Less makeup. More clothes. My build was more athletic now, my breasts smaller, though still bigger than I would have preferred. I worked out borderline obsessively to keep my body strong. If that made me less curvy and less attractive to men, so much the better.
If Cole failed to recognize me, I might be able to get in and out of Newburgh without the disapproving looks I’d grown accustomed to in high school, the same looks that had driven me out of town in the first place. I held my breath, waiting for his response.
He tilted up his chin, looking me over. The shadow from his hat shifted to reveal the icy blue orbs of doom otherwise known as his eyes. “Mandy,” he stated, stark as a cliff face. “Still driving the old Blazer, huh? You back because of your dad?”
Figured. Leave it to a cop never to forget what kind of car a person drove. “Hi, Cole. Yeah. You heard?”
An affirmative lift of his chin. No condolences. I’d seen Cole and my dad having a shouting match in my driveway shortly before I’d hightailed it out of town. I couldn’t hear what the fight had been about from inside the trailer, but I’d recognized the sizzling tension of a friendship snapping in two.
Cole and my dad had been tight. He’d been around enough that I’d developed an age-inappropriate crush on him that had lasted a good portion of my teen years. I say age-inappropriate because he’d been thirty-four to my eighteen when I’d left town. When I’d started crushing on him, I’d been fifteen and he’d been twice my age and some change. The craziness of the age-mismatched crush didn’t escape me, but hormones weren’t exactly known for being rational. At least I’d had some semblance of common sense at fifteen, a fact that should not be taken for granted. I’d known to keep my distance from the Oakley-wearing cop with the bad-boy smile, python arms, and male-pattern baldness he’d rocked with a buzz cut. I’d drooled over him from the window of the trailer, but we had rarely interacted outside of my giving him the occasional shy wave when he’d climb the stairs to Dad’s shop above the garage.
My palms began to sweat at the memory of Cole throwing down the kickstand of his police-issue Harley, short-sleeved polyester blues offering the teeniest glimpse of white undershirt stretched around rock-hard biceps.
“You going to the funeral?” I croaked, discreetly (hopefully) wiping my palms on my jeans.
He rested a forearm on my window ledge. He didn’t have a jacket on, so I could see exactly how well he filled out the forest-green state trooper uniform. Huh. Cole was a statie now. He’d been on the local police force when I’d left. Why the change? Scratch that. None of my business.
“Yeah,” he said. “Most of the force will be there. Should be interesting.” His nearness made me shiver. So did his voice. It had been a long time since I’d heard a New Hampshire accent, which was softer than the R-dropping Boston accent but more impatient than the Maine drawl. I’d never acquired the distinctive accent. Neither had a lot of the kids I’d gone to high school with. I blamed television. Cole was a generation ahead of me and my contemporaries, though. He had the accent. I liked it on him.
Then I registered what he’d said. “Should be interesting.” He must have meant me being in the same room with the Newburgh Police Department.
Shame pulsed up my neck and over my cheeks. I’d worked so hard to purge that shame from my system. Now it was back like it had never been gone, fresh as it had been the night he had to be remembering right now.
“Looks like you could use a little help,” he said.
I blinked. “Yeah.” The shame receded. I wasn’t Mandy Homerun instead of Mandy Holcomb. My years of education, internships, and working with women who had suffered abuse came back in a flood of confidence. Only, that flood was accompanied by a different kind of shame, shame that I’d forgotten all the knowledge I’d crammed into my brain. I’d let myself get pulled into the emotional undertow of a past I’d spent years in counseling to deal with. “I can’t get the tire off,” I said past numb lips. “It’s stuck.”
Cole’s hand on my window frame was relaxed and pale. Very New Hampshire in December. He tapped his middle finger absently on the depressed door-lock post. I couldn’t help noticing the lack of any notable jewelry on the neighboring ring finger. It was his left hand.
“Sit tight,” he said, smirking. Cocky. “I’ll change it.” He slapped the window ledge and stepped to the rear of the beast while I powered up the window to keep the heat in.
Five minutes later, he was back, red faced. I’d been watching in the mirror. He hadn’t been able to get the wheel off either.
My turn to smirk. I resisted the urge to say I’d told him so as I lowered the window again.
“Must be rusted on,” he said. “Come on. Get in the cruiser.”—He pronounced it crooz-ah. “We’ll swing by your dad’s and pick up some WD-40 from the shop. You got the keys, right?”
“I know where he keeps them.” Dad’s lawyer was supposed to have left me a key to the trailer in a hiding spot on the porch. Presuming I could get into the trailer, I could find the keys to the shop. I even remembered where Dad kept the WD-40. “But I’m not getting in the cruiser.” I folded my arms. No way was I getting in a police car. Never again. Not willingly, anyway.
“It’s not even a mile. Come on. Let’s do this so I can get home. Been a long day.” He rubbed his stubble. “Couple-a days, actually.” He flicked up the lock and opened my door.
I yanked it closed. “No.” I heard the edge of panic in my voice and turned it down a few notches. “I’ll call for a tow—shoot.” My phone. I kept forgetting.
I jammed my hand between the seat and the console, knowing it was futile even as I did it. Desperation was a funny thing. It made you believe you had a shot at pulling off the impossible. “You made me drop my phone between the seats when you knocked on my window,” I explained, realizing I must look completely insane. I gave up the effort. It would take a flashlight, a c
oat hanger and a lot of patience I didn’t have right now to get that phone out. “Can I borrow yours? You have a cell, right? Just let me make a call and you can get out of here.”
He studied me a few beats and pulled a cell phone from his belt, but he didn’t hand it to me. He jabbed at the screen and put it on speaker. When his call connected, a female voice came on the line. He grinned as he told the mystery woman he needed a favor and gave her our location. “Bring some WD-40 with you,” he said before signing off. “It’ll be a few minutes,” he told me. “Put up the window and crank that heat.”
He left to get in his patrol car. I expected him to be on his way, but he stayed put. Before long another patrol car pulled up behind his. A tall female officer with a great rack—and I’m not talking gun rack—got out. Cole greeted her with a smile and speech that was muffled through my sealed up windows but clearly cordial.
Irrational jealousy made me clench my fists on my knees.
Cole snagged the blue can Officer Busty handed him. Was it my imagination, or was she standing a little closer than professionalism dictated? I mean, come on, this was a roadside emergency, not a state patrol department mixer.
Logically I knew it was stupid to think jealous thoughts in the direction of a guy sixteen years my senior whom I barely knew and hadn’t seen in years. But it was what I felt. I owned it. I’d get over it. My crush on Cole was back from hiatus. Fine. It’d be gone again as soon as I hit the road back to Philly.
Which couldn’t happen soon enough.
Unfortunately, I had a to-do list a mile long, and I couldn’t leave until it was done. Topping the list was meeting with Max, my dad’s lawyer and executor, to start closing down the gunsmith business. Then cleaning out the trailer and figuring out what to do with anything valuable or sentimental. Then the funeral on Christmas Eve morning. Somewhere in there, I’d have to figure out Dad’s medical bills, which had apparently racked up at an alarming rate in the six weeks since his diagnosis. Max would help, he’d told me on the phone, but since he charged by the hour, he’d encouraged me to do as much as I could myself. My student loans had dibs on anything left over after Dad’s estate was settled. Therefore, I was ready to put in some serious hours to keep Max’s bill down.
