Bennett pinched the bridge of his nose and fantasized about researching flight information for the first plane back to San Francisco.
‘I can’t. I have to work.’
The mayor and every face that turned toward him looked highly skeptical of this.
‘Remote work is still work.’
‘But it’s flexible, right?’ Jeanie asked. ‘Like you could just pop up there a few times before the farm reopens? Just to make sure there’s no, like, skulls lying around or anything?’
Bennett looked at her and tried to convey just how much he wanted to bury her body right now, but she was completely serious about this. And when he looked around the room, so was everyone else.
The entire town was recruiting him to go to their beloved Christmas-tree farm and what? Scan for dead bodies? Find a secret stash of money? Solve the town mystery?
And the hilarious part was they thought Kira was actually going to let him in! Ha! The joke was on them. Judging by the way she’d looked at him yesterday, there was no way she was inviting him for afternoon tea and murder-mystery-solving anytime soon.
But everyone was staring at him like they needed him to do this.
And Bennett hated saying no. Even to crazy villagers he barely knew.
‘I can try, but…’
‘Wonderful!’ the mayor said, already moving on. ‘So, Bennett will help with the Christmas-tree farm opening. Okay, what’s next?’
I can try but it will never work was what he’d been going to say. Not that it mattered. He’d been steamrolled and now instead of a ride to the airport, he was apparently opening a Christmas-tree farm, or working on a cold case, or treasure hunting…
But most likely just getting kicked out on his ass by the latest scary Christmas-tree farm owner.
Chapter Three
There were dogs outside. Kira could hear them barking as she rinsed her coffee mug and peered out the window over the sink. The one that let in so much cold air, she could feel it on her face as she washed dishes, but she didn’t know what to do about that.
Another bark! She wiped the condensation from the window, but she still couldn’t see anything.
Maybe she had customers! Customers with dogs! Maybe they’d dressed the dogs in little dog sweaters for a Christmas photo shoot! That would be adorable. And it would look great on the new social media account she’d finally managed to set up when she’d got a weak signal in the far corner of one of the upstairs guest rooms. As long as she stayed perfectly still and faced the wall, the internet worked perfectly.
She should get outside to greet them, even though she’d hired a lovely and very responsible-looking woman to sit in the booth and work the register, but if these were her first customers ever she should go out and see. And get their permission to post pics of their holiday sweater-wearing dogs.
That was why she was scrabbling for her boots and pulling on her new puffy coat so fast. Customers meant money and money meant heat. And new windows.
See, everything was going to be fine. She was going to pull this off all on her own. She didn’t need Chloe. If she was being honest, Chloe had probably been holding her back all these years, with her practicality and realistic expectations. It was time for Kira to go big. To live her dream, regardless of how recently this dream had popped up. She was going to make money off this Christmas-tree obsessed town and then she could live off the land just like @thehomesteadgoddess and @selfsustainedliving and all the other lovely and beautiful accounts she followed. If they could do it, surely she could do it.
Kira hurried out the back door, fantasizing about pickled vegetables lined up in neat rows in her pantry, and cross-stitched aprons, not that she knew how to pickle anything or what the hell cross-stitch involved. She followed the sound of the barking dogs through the lines of trees, up two rows, across three.
There!
Oh.
‘You.’
The man from the other day had his head down, as though he was looking for something in the dirt, but it snapped up when he heard her voice. ‘Hello, again,’ he said, a hand raised in greeting.
‘Why are you back?’ Kira’s dreams of Christmas doggie photoshoots fizzled out. Elizabeth, the biggest of the three dogs, nudged against her hand. Kira gave her head a good scratch. These dogs weren’t wearing sweaters, but they were still pretty darn cute.
‘The sign said open.’
Kira frowned. ‘And you’re here to buy a tree?’
The man smiled. ‘I’m considering it. If I can find the right one.’
‘The right one?’ she huffed. ‘It’s just a tree, not a wife.’
His laugh startled her and the dogs. Odie barked in alarm.
‘I have very high standards for my Christmas trees,’ he said, his eyes sparking in amusement.
‘I bet you do.’ He probably had obnoxiously high standards for a lot of things. But if Kira liked that sort of thing she would have stuck around at home for longer.
‘You don’t?’ he asked.
‘Not about Christmas trees, no.’
He glanced around at the farm she now owned but luckily for him refrained from commenting about how she should probably care about the quality of her Christmas trees.
Instead, he shrugged and said, ‘I like your coat.’
‘Thank you. It’s so damn cold here, I had to upgrade.’
He chuckled. ‘It hasn’t even dropped below freezing yet.’
