by Carly Keene
Christmas Angel Wishes
Christmas Lumberjacks 3
Carly Keene
Thistle Knoll Press
Copyright 2019 Carly Keene. 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. The only exception is that short excerpts may be quoted in a review. Cover designed by Graphicdiz at Fiverr. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Epilogue 1
Epilogue 2
Thank You!
Coming Soon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1
Another Lonely December
Dakota
Another December, another day selling Christmas trees.
I finish my coffee and put my breakfast dishes in the dishwasher. I’m the only one living here, but I appreciate a nice clean house as much as anybody, so I keep things neat. It’s my house, this little cabin on the edge of the tree farm that I built last summer from a kit, and I love it. Got a great view of the Smokies off the back deck, and from the master bedroom upstairs, through that big picture window. It’s almost like sleeping outside.
My grandfather, Sam Sledd—Poppy, we called him—would’ve loved this place. It has the same welcoming feel as his old farmhouse, but it’s more rustic and farther from the barns and shop, closer to the mountains. It’s so peaceful out here.
Living here instead of at the farmhouse means I’ve got a longer commute than my brother Adam, but that’s still only five minutes. The tree farm is going great guns these days, only two years after Adam’s wife Holly took over and made it a year-round attraction, and we’ve even had to hire seasonal help to run the gift shop and cater the events in the converted horse barn. The Christmas Lumberjacks service, where we Sledd brothers help customers select their tree and cut it down for them, is so busy these days that we’re going to have to hire more employees for that. University of Tennessee, where I studied, has a great forestry program; I’ll mention it to Holly later for next fall’s recruiting.
I take one more look around the cabin’s great room before heading out to my truck. It’s a little bare, but that’s okay, I don’t need much. Couch in front of the fire, big sheepskin rug on the floor. Coffee table I made myself. Nothing fancy at all, and that’s the way I like it.
It is, however, a little lonely. I see how comfortable Adam is with Holly and their sweet little baby girl, and how my other brother Jackson is with his girlfriend Noelle, and I feel incomplete. Someday there’s going to be a woman in my life. I just haven’t found her yet.
I sigh, and slam the truck door.
Gotta go to work.
Jackson and I get busy right away cutting and stacking Fraser firs and white pines to go to the precut lot, and before lunch Adam comes to help. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a week, and he’s ordering us around. Jackson and me, we can’t help ragging on him a little bit. “Yo, Sleepy,” I say, “chainsaw needs oiling.”
“Did you just call me Sleepy?” Adam says, incredulous. He reaches for the chainsaw anyway.
“Like one of the seven dwarves,” Jackson says, and winks at me where Adam can’t see.
“Who you callin’ a dwarf?” Adam shoots back. He’s got two inches on Jackson.
“He didn’t call you a dwarf,” I tell him, and heave a six-foot pine onto the pickup. “I did. Little bro.” And I grin with satisfaction, because I’ve got two inches on him even though he’s two years older.
“I am not a dwarf,” Adam says, and although he’s clearly cranky from lack of sleep, he gets a gleam in his eye. “And I am nobody’s little bro. Who signs y’all’s checks, anyway?”
“Your wife does,” Jackson points out.
“Not this week. This week,” and Adam stops to rub his hand over his face, “since Bella appears to be teething and is only sleeping like three hours a night, Holly has relinquished check-writing duties to me.”
My eyebrows go up. “I thought five months was too early to start teething.”
“Five and a half. And no, it’s not too early. Google says four to seven months is average.” Adam sets the chainsaw on the pickup bed and opens the oil reservoir.
“Yikes,” Jackson. “Not gonna catch me having kids. I need my rest.”
Adam smiles in his tired face. “It’s not all bad. We’re pretty sure she said ‘dada’ last night.”
I sigh in pretend sympathy, and catch Jackson’s eye. “Well, I’m sorry we called you Sleepy.”
“Yeah, we’re sorry,” Jackson tells him. “We should’ve called you Dopey instead.”
Adam chases Jackson and tackles him between trees, scrubbing his knuckles through Jackson’s hair. I tackle both of them and we wind up in a pile of Sledd brothers on the ground. Adam gives me a noogie for good measure, and I let him do it because we did tease. It’s in the brother code.
“Well, here we all are,” Jackson says. “Happy and stupid.”
“Speak for yourself, not me,” I tell him.
Instead of teasing back, they both turn and look at me. “Dak. Man, we know you’re not happy.” Jackson sits up. “We can tell. We just don’t know why.”
I’m taken aback. It shows?
“Dakota needs a girl,” Adam says to Jackson. “We’re flaunting shacked-up happiness in front of him, and he’s got nobody to play house with.”
“I could have somebody to play with if I wanted,” I snap back, nettled. “Y’all ain’t the only guys who can land a female. Just gotta find the right one.”
Adam frowns. “I don’t think that’s all,” Jackson says.
It’s not.
I’ve been happy to keep Poppy’s dream alive and help the tree farm survive. It means a lot to me for the land to stay in the family, and I especially love seeing the trees dot each hill in satisfying rows. It’s just that Adam doesn’t need me anymore. I passed up a promotion with the Forest Service a couple of years ago, knowing that I couldn’t commit to the time required and help my brothers keep Sledd’s running.
I’d rather be out in the park, in the Smokies, taking care of real forest. That’s where my heart lies.
And yeah, my heart is lonely too. I’ve been looking for the right girl for a long time, and I’ve been looking harder since both my brothers have found their life mates. No luck yet.
I get up. “I’m fine, y’all. We got work to do.”
Behind my back, I see my brothers exchange worried glances. I keep working.
That’s what I do, I keep working.
As afternoon stretches into evening, I’m watching the sun get low and the sky get dim, and somewhere at the back of my mind I’m thinking that every December of my life is going to be like this, dimmer and dimmer and lonelier and lonelier. I sigh.
A big white Lexus pulls up in the gravel parking lot while I’m selling a six-foot precut white pine to a millennial guy in skinny jeans, and I wonder who the hell would bring a luxury car to transport a Christmas tree. You’d scratch the paint, tying the tree down, for one thing, and there are probably a thousand other reasons not to do something that stupid.
Adam calls me over, once I’ve sent skinny-jeans guy to go see Miss Nancy at the cash register. He’s standing by the white Lexus, talking to a woman in a pink suede coat and
cream toboggan hat. “Hey,” he says, “can you take this lady out to pick out a really big tree? At least twelve feet. I gotta go catch that church youth group coming in to pick up the ten-foot fir.” He scoots off.
I’m still eyeing the Lexus. Idiot woman. “Sure. One that big, though, ma’am, you might have to leave it here and pick it up in a different vehicle later.”
“Well,” the woman says, in a voice soft and sweet as cotton candy, “my daddy owns Montgomery Construction. He might have a truck big enough. Unless you deliver?”
“We don’t,” I say, and then I get a good look at her, and I can’t talk at all.
She’s tall for a woman—maybe 5’9”, six inches shorter than me—and proportional, with a deep bosom and womanly hips. Like a classical statue come to life, but in Ugg boots. She’s young, though, maybe early twenties, with not one wrinkle on her face at all, and it’s a beautiful face, with full lips, all soft pink and kissable. Delicate straight nose, lovely cheekbones, gorgeous crystal-green eyes. People probably tell her all the time, “You should lose some weight, you have such a pretty face,” and that’s complete bullshit because she’s perfect the way she is.
She holds out her mittened hand to me, those pale green eyes as sweet and earnest as the rest of her face. “I’m Angelina.”
2
A Really Tall Christmas Tree
Angelina
“Bye, Miss Angel!” Mason waves goodbye to me at the day care door. His mother looks harried, but she gives me a smile and wave as well.
“Have a great weekend, Mason, and I’ll see you on Monday,” I call to him.
He’s the last out of the classroom, and I can finish sweeping up and making sure all the trash goes in the trashcan before the janitor gets here. I put a lonely Paw Patrol mitten in the Lost and Found box, and return a handful of building blocks to their assigned tote. It’s December, and I’m looking forward to the ornaments I’ll help the kids make next week for their own trees—it’s the cutest project, angels cut out of construction paper, each topped with a pipe-cleaner halo and a photo of each child’s face. Perfect for three- and four-year-olds.
I tug on coat and hat, and gather my tote bag.
I have two totes, actually: a gorgeous pale-pink Kate Spade tote that my mother sent me for my birthday, and a yellow canvas one hand-painted with “Busy Bees Daycare.” I love both of them, for different reasons. The Kate Spade is awesome because it’s my favorite color, in Italian leather smoother than a baby’s bottom. The canvas tote is really my life, though, because it has all these cool ideas for things to do with preschoolers: games, crafts, learning activities, you name it. It’s all in there.
I’ve been teaching for two years, and I’m really happy with my job, getting to teach and love on children whose parents work.
I’m almost out the front door before my phone starts ringing with the tone I assigned to my stepmother. I set down my bags and yank out the phone, managing not to roll my eyes at the daycare director, Leigh, who is the same age as Manda but eight million times more reasonable. “Hi, Manda, what’s up?”
“Are you done at work yet? Your father needs you to go pick up the tree,” she demands.
“The what?”
“The tree. You know, the Christmas tree. For the foyer.” Manda scoffs. “We’re having people over for cocktails and dinner on Sunday evening, so we need to get the tree today and you need to help me decorate it tomorrow.” I blink. Manda has very definite ideas on how to decorate everything, and she has no patience for my enjoyment of ornaments made by children. Anything involving pipe cleaners, for example, is automatically rejected. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you exactly what to do.”
I’ll just bet you will.
I imagine myself saying it, and then I imagine Daddy’s indignant face if I did say it. “Did you order one somewhere? Where should I go to get it?” I ask, instead.
There’s a half-second of icy silence on the other end of the call, and Manda informs me that finding a tree is my job because she’s swamped with this last-minute party. She starts listing all the things she has to do about catering and liquor and renting cocktail tables, but I cut her off.
“I thought the weather report was calling for snow tomorrow. You know how people get around here when it snows—they want to hunker down and build snowmen in the yard, not go out for cocktails.”
Manda huffs. “It’s not going to snow. Your job is the tree. Pick a tall one, obviously,” she says, “at least twelve feet, Angelina, and preferably taller, because the foyer ceiling is sixteen feet high.”
“Do we have a ladder tall enough to reach the top of a fifteen-foot tree?” I ask, incredulous. Sure, Daddy owns a construction company and they have all kinds of equipment, but still. That would be a long ladder. I try picturing myself at the top of it, teetering over to attach a gaudy gold star to the highest branch, and every bone in my body just nopes out of the vision.
I’d prefer not to deal with Manda, but it’s not up to me. Daddy left Mama when I was twelve, right after he met Manda, whose interior decorator company was furnishing the new bank building that his company had just constructed downtown. Mama swore Manda wouldn’t stick (“She’s just a gold-digger, Angelina, and she’ll get tired of his tantrums soon enough,”), but that was twelve years ago, and Manda did stick despite Daddy’s quirks. Half my life I’ve been bouncing back and forth between my parents.
This past summer Mama remarried and moved to Atlanta, and she sold the house I grew up in. Daddy wouldn’t hear of my getting an apartment for myself, insisting that since I’d chosen such a low-paying career that I might as well not have gone to college at all, I needed to save every precious little penny I earned. So I moved in with Daddy and Manda.
Manda runs Verna, our live-in cook, ragged, insisting that she prepare a meal for Daddy, and then a separate meal for Manda. God forbid they eat the same thing. Daddy favors homestyle cuisine: pot roast with carrots and potatoes, fried chicken and biscuits, and green beans cooked for hours with a piece of fatback until they’re meltingly soft. Manda won’t touch that kind of food, and she insists on salads and broiled fish. At dinner, Manda always waits to see which items I put on my plate before remarking on my choices, and it doesn’t matter whether I pick the pot roast or the tilapia with steamed broccoli.
Manda says she’s concerned about health, but what she really worries about is gaining weight. She’s so skinny that she has to hold on to heavy objects in a high wind.
And I . . . am not. I am built like a girly version of my dad, who played left tackle in high school. Well, like a football player with boobs. Lord knows I’ve got cleavage and to spare.
“Maybe you’d just better get a twelve-footer,” Manda huffs into the phone, bringing me out of my private irritation. “Find out where the best place to go is, and go there. And come home with a tree.”
“Is there a budget?” I ask.
“I don’t care! Spend whatever it takes. You’ve got that credit card Lewis gave you.” She hangs up without a goodbye, leaving me with the call-ended tone.
Leigh’s been packing up while I’ve been harangued, and she picks up her coat and her keys. “Ready to get out of here?” she asks, turning off the lights and walking to the door. “You’re always the last one to leave, making sure your room is pristine the way you do.” She smiles, and pats me on the shoulder.
I nod. “Leigh? Where’s a good place to get a fresh-cut Christmas tree? A really tall one?”
She locks the front door behind us. “For a tree as tall as you’re looking for, you might have to go out and get one custom-cut for you. I’ve heard good things about Sledd’s Winter Festival. They’re out in Sledd’s Run, if you don’t mind a drive east of the city.” She smiles. “Word is they’ve got good-looking men who’ll cut the tree down with an ax, if you pay a service fee. Maybe you can get a nice flirt on.”
I haven’t really dated anybody since college, but thanks to a couple of cocktail nights with my colleagues, Leigh knows I�
��m a sucker for a nice set of biceps. I’d love to go out with someone who made me feel small, or at least not fat, but there aren’t many semi-giants around.
Still, I do need to get a Christmas tree. “I’ll give it a shot.”
3
Angelina Makes Wishes
Angelina
Leigh was right, Sledd’s Winter Festival and Tree Farm is allll the way east of Knoxville, in a little community I didn’t even know existed before now. It’s pretty out here, away from the city and close to the mountains. It’s also going to be a fairly long drive back to Daddy’s house.
I park Daddy’s older Lexus (the one he insists I drive instead of buying my own) in the parking lot and get out, immediately entranced. The place looks like a Christmas dream: Christmas trees everywhere, some decorated and some not, strings upon strings of sparkling lights, a “Santa’s playground” area that my preschool kids would adore, and the smell of hot chocolate and peppermint in the air.
There’s even a hot lumberjack.
He’s taken, though. Just my luck. He’s wearing a wedding ring, and stops to kiss a short, curly-haired woman on his way over to greet me.
“Hi there,” he says. “What can we help you with this evening? The precut trees are over here, and of course we offer the Christmas Lumberjack service too, where we cut a tree for you.”
I glance over at the trees that have already been cut. Pretty, but not as big as I need. “I’m sorry about this, but I have to have a really tall tree.”
“Oh, you don’t have to apologize,” the guys says, and smiles at me. “How tall? We’ve got some bigger ones out in the field. They’ll be more expensive, I warn you, but they’re available.”
“Twelve to fifteen feet?” I hazard.
“We’ve got some that big.” He looks past me. “Ah. I gotta go talk to that group that just pulled in, it’s a special order. Let me get my brother, and he’ll be happy to take care of you. Is that okay?”
