Library

Chapter 2

Amanda Anderson, a.k.a. a big-city dog walker who is currently very confused

Dane Silver is hot.

Which should not be the thought at the top of my mind, ever , especially now as he’s driving us through town to meet his family and also tell them the lie that we’re engaged.

But break the family feud ?

And by pretending to be madly in love?

That. Is. So. Hot.

I shiver like I haven’t sweated through my bra twice over already today.

And like I haven’t shivered six times already at the memory of him not only offering to go along with my charade, but also giving me a solid reason to believe there’s greater good in it.

Don’t ask what happened to my belly when he dropped to one knee.

That was stress. Had to be stress.

“You’re sure you’re okay with this plan?” he asks as he pulls his rental car out of Lorelei’s driveway to take us to his grandparents’ house for a cookout.

“Kinda my own fault.” There’s no kinda . This is 100 percent my fault.

I thought I was walking into the Gingerbread for hugs and welcome-homes and excitement over Grandma’s fiftieth anniversary of running the bakery, and instead, I walked into a massive guilt trip.

Amanda. You’re a dog walker. If you were headlining Broadway shows or walking red carpets like you thought you’d be when you left for New York ... but there’s no one else. Surely you can give up walking dogs for your family? For your hometown?

Like New York isn’t where I belong. Like the job that I love doesn’t matter. Like my friends and neighbors in New York don’t make me feel warm and welcome and free to be myself. Like the kids who keep showing up asking when they can audition for our first show at the community theater don’t matter.

Like just because someone else could do it , it’s not important enough for it to be my dream. Like because I don’t have blood relatives there, it can’t actually be home.

The biggest problem making me realize just how much bigger this problem is, though?

I haven’t told my family that I wrote the play .

They don’t know my community theater is doing my play .

I’m afraid to tell them because I was so vocal about being an actress and then ... it just didn’t work.

What if my play is just as terrible?

I don’t want to hear the oh, Amanda s that would come.

Didn’t you learn that theater isn’t really for you as an adult all those years ago?

So I haven’t told them.

I haven’t told them why I care so much, and I don’t know how.

“Doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” Dane says. “What matters is that we can still back out.”

“After the cookout,” I reply.

The cookout is our trial run. If we can win over even one member of Dane’s family tonight—Lorelei excluded—then we agree that we’ll continue this and see if we can knock down the walls one by one before our “elopement” next month.

If we can’t—well.

We haven’t agreed yet on what comes next after the cookout if we can’t. I think we should still try my mom and Grandma tomorrow. He’s been less committed.

“You look like you’re about to throw up,” he says.

“It’s how I prep for all of my roles.”

He slides me another look. One side of his mouth hitches up. “Uh-huh.”

I shouldn’t trust him this much, but Lorelei has always said he’s the best man she knows, and I adore Lorelei, so we’re doing this.

If I have other options, I can’t think of what they might be.

We’re both putting a lot on the line here. We could both completely lose our families over this. There was something in the set of his jaw and the faraway, haunted look in his eyes while he was pacing Lorelei’s living room that made me suspect this is about something bigger to him.

But I still put him in this position, so I feel like I owe it to him to be honest. “Do you ever feel like your family loves you, but not enough to trust you to do what’s best for yourself, even when you’re nearly thirty years old, and you start to resent it, but then you do something immensely stupid and realize that you might completely lose them over it, but also, you’re mad that they’ve put you in this position in the first place and you’re trying not to be mad because you know they’re doing what they think is best, but it’s just ... complicated?”

His entire body lifts with the size of the breath that he inhales, and his cheeks puff as he blows it out. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

My heart squeezes. “That part makes me a little sick to my stomach,” I whisper.

I love my grandma. I love my mom. I want both of them to be able to retire and enjoy their time outside of the bakery, even if Mom’s retirement is still several years away.

But that’s the point of Grandma announcing me as her successor. To have someone in the wings for whenever Mom’s ready to step aside, too, which will likely be sooner rather than later.

And me belonging in New York aside, I’m not the right person to run it.

I would rather that they think I’ve betrayed them by loving the wrong person than tell them the truth that living here and running the gingerbread bakery would make me miserable, and I’d ultimately destroy it.

Not because I’d want to destroy it. I love the Gingerbread House. I have so many good memories from the kitchen. Helping little kids put together their own gingerbread houses that actually taste good. Helping Mom and Grandma swap out the nutcracker decorations with the seasons. Riding the float in the Christmas parade and tossing out miniature gingerbread cookies to all the kids along the route.

But I can love the Gingerbread House and also know that running it is not what I’m supposed to do with my life. It’s like loving the tree at Rockefeller Center and knowing you’re not supposed to have one of your own in your dinky apartment. Or like adoring a Monet at the Met and knowing that it, too, doesn’t belong in your apartment.

There are things you embrace in your everyday life, and things that are better left for short visits.

Tinsel is for short visits.

New York is where my heart and my life and my creativity are.

“At least you know how to act,” Dane says. “I’ll be the weak link here.”

“Do you believe that us faking this engagement to end a feud is a good thing to do?”

“Yes.”

“Just feel that, and you’ll do great.”

I hope.

I don’t know his story or what his family expects of him. Actually, I don’t know much about him at all. We quickly covered that he moved to San Francisco after college to work at an engineering firm that manages automated assembly lines for various manufacturing companies around the world. He has an adorable if lazy dog who’s chilling in the back seat. And he wants to end our families’ feud badly enough that he’s willing to pretend to be engaged to me to do it.

“How can a guy go wrong when his fiancée believes in him?” he deadpans.

For the first time in what feels like centuries, I actually laugh.

He slides me another look. “I won the school spelling bee when I was in fourth grade.”

I would’ve been in third. Was I there? “You’re very smart.”

“My dad had everyone over to celebrate, and the first thing both my uncle and my grandpa said was Those Andersons have never had a kid win a spelling bee. Take that, idiots .”

I wince.

“That’s what makes me sick to my stomach,” he adds. “As a kid, I didn’t understand why it made me feel gross inside, but I can tell you now exactly what the problem is. They make every win about beating your family instead of about celebrating that one of us grandkids did something pretty cool. I’m done with this feud. If our families can’t fucking get over this ... I don’t know the next time I’ll voluntarily come back to Tinsel.”

Oh.

I swallow, then have to swallow again.

No big deal. All that’s riding on this fake engagement now is my best friend’s brother not walking away from his hometown entirely.

No pressure.

None at all.

“I’m sorry the feud hurt you,” I say. “For what it’s worth—I hated it when we were growing up too. I just wanted to be Lorelei’s friend, and I couldn’t, and I still don’t entirely understand why. I just know it’s easier to sneak around to see her than it is to deal with my family being mad at me.”

He frowns as we approach downtown Tinsel. I don’t think the frown means he’s unhappy, though. Any more unhappy, I mean.

It’s more that I’m realizing he has resting grumpy face when he’s thinking.

Every time he’s frowned that specific frown in the hour or so since we agreed to keep up this fake engagement, at least for tonight, within moments, he’s spouted off some brilliance about why it’s a good plan. “If tonight goes well, I need to move into your cabin with you for the week.”

I choke on air.

We’ve agreed that we’re not telling Lorelei that our engagement is fake. She doesn’t need to carry this secret, and we need no one else to know if it’s going to work.

We’ve agreed that I’d come to the cookout his family had planned tonight because if this were real, we’d be racing to tell his family the minute mine found out. They won’t forgive him if the rumor mill reaches them first, and we’re already in the danger zone.

We’ve agreed on a story for how we reconnected, when we started talking, and when we knew it was love.

And we agreed that if we need to break up after tonight, we’ll work out the details later, even if I’m a little on edge that us breaking up tonight could make my life way more complicated.

Especially since it drove my grandmother to one of her “heart attacks.”

But this is the first time he’s caught me truly off guard. “What? No. There’s only one bedroom in the cabin.”

“You told your family we’re eloping next month. We’re telling mine the same thing. If we want them to believe we’re madly in love, we have to stay together. Overnight. We can’t stay at Lorelei’s. She’ll figure out we’re faking. I’ll sleep on the couch, but I need to stay at your family’s cabin with you.”

I stare at his profile. He has thick dark hair falling over his forehead, a prominent nose, and lips that aren’t too thin or too thick, and he’s sporting a five o’clock shadow on his cheeks and square jaw. His cheekbones are chiseled of stone, much like they were in high school, but he’s bulkier now than he was then. He’s still on the slender side—tall and wide but slender—but there’s definition to his legs and arms that wasn’t there before.

I didn’t pay a lot of attention to him then. Then, he was Lorelei’s academic older brother who was headed to Stanford to study to be an engineer.

We don’t get a lot of kids leaving Tinsel and heading to Stanford. It was a big deal.

Big enough that there was a lot of eye-rolling at every family function of mine. Ooh, they think they’re so special, having someone who’s smart. Or dumb enough to take on the loans that’ll come with that. Just wait until Amanda’s lighting up the Hollywood screen. They’ll see who’s the better product of Tinsel then.

Dane’s right.

The fighting between our families serves absolutely no purpose.

It’s a stain on the town, causing the mayor and other community leaders to intervene basically every month to get things done if our families have conflicting opinions.

And they do.

Mostly out of spite. Grandma’s said so herself. Those new streetlamps would’ve been a good idea if I’d thought of them. Or Those Silvers know we need to update the welcome sign, but they’re arguing just for the fun of it .

While I’m sure eventually our generation would drop the bickering, it should end now .

Why am I a grown adult who still has to sneak around to have dinner with her hometown BFF?

“I’ll tell her we didn’t want to ruin the surprise,” he adds. “Chili and I have always stayed with her when we’re in town. She would’ve been suspicious if I’d told her I was staying anywhere else.”

I glance over my shoulder at his dog in the back seat.

Chili doesn’t even crack an eyelid.

He is easily the laziest dog I’ve ever met. Or possibly the most tired. “Have you had his bloodwork checked recently?”

Dane grins, which is adorable.

Have I ever seen him smile before?

I don’t think I have. Or if I have, it didn’t register the way it does now.

“Yeah, his bloodwork is fine,” he says. “He’s decided his purpose on this earth is to see how little energy he can expend and still survive. His favorite treats are hot dogs, and he’ll pick them over chicken or steak, but that’s pretty much the only thing he jumps at these days. Not that he gets treats often. I lean vegetarian.”

Another smile creeps onto my face despite all the reasons I’ve felt like I’d never smile again today. “You lean vegetarian?”

“Some days you can’t beat a hamburger.”

He turns onto Kringle Lane, the main street through downtown Tinsel, where our families each have their own shops right across from each other.

Even during a ninety-degree heat wave, you can count on Tinsel to be a winter wonderland. Fake snow covers the easement between the sidewalks and street. The flower boxes are full of decorative candy canes mixed with poinsettias that won’t bloom for a few more months. The hot chocolate stand at the end of the street is open and running a solid business with the tourists despite the heat.

Likely it’s iced hot chocolate.

When the sun goes down, holiday lights will twinkle on around all the old-fashioned streetlamps.

I crack my window, and yes .

There it is.

I smelled it earlier, when I stopped in to see Grandma and Mom at the gingerbread bakery, but I still love the ever-present cinnamon, pine, and woodsmoke scents lingering together.

Tinsel wasn’t always a holiday town. But sometime in the 1960s, with my family’s gingerbread bakery well established and the Silvers’ fruitcake shop doing good business, the dairy just outside of town started offering eggnog year-round. The corner market added a section of ornaments that you could get anytime. The businesses in downtown started leaving their holiday lights up well into the New Year, and then the fashion boutique on Main Street changed its name to Mrs. Claus’s Attic.

The rest of the town followed suit, and soon, we were the destination for people who wanted to celebrate Christmas in July ... and August, and February, and why not May, and so on. Streets were renamed with holiday themes. The parks in town too. Within a few short years, everything was Christmas all year round.

Grandma says our family started it.

I’m sure Dane’s family says the same.

I know the mayor stops by and asks Grandma and Mom to please not chase customers away from the Fruitcake Emporium on a regular basis. I can only imagine what she has to ask the Silvers to do.

My grandma does enough volunteer work on the various holiday committees around town that people won’t outright tell her to get over herself, but I’ve sat in on enough meetings to feel the tension that creeps in when someone says something nice about Dane’s relatives.

Shame.

That’s what I’m feeling.

Shame.

Shame that our families make the entire community walk on eggshells.

This isn’t how the behind-the-scenes of a Christmas town should feel.

We pass the Gingerbread House on the left and the Fruitcake Emporium on the right. Zero doubt the Gingerbread House is playing a Dolly Parton Christmas album. I can almost taste the frosting that we use for gluing houses together, and out of habit, I wave to the two four-foot nutcracker statuettes guarding the door.

The one on the left is holding a surfboard. The one on the right is wearing a swimsuit.

It’s how Grandma does Christmas in August.

Next month, she’ll replace them with schoolteacher nutcrackers. October, they’ll be ghosts. November, turkey farmers.

Every year, she ponders if she can change up the nutcrackers to aim a middle finger at the Fruitcake Emporium, and every year, my mom reminds her that we’re the classy family in the feud.

I will carry the secret to my grave that I actually like their fruitcake.

Lorelei used to sneak it to me in her lunch box at school.

“Do you like gingerbread?” I ask Dane. It seems like something his fiancée should know.

“I like building gingerbread houses.”

“Tell me you don’t mean with the store-bought kits.”

“I do not use store-bought kits.”

“Store-bought kits are the reason people hate gingerbread.”

“I promise, I only use gingerbread that Lorelei bakes.”

“She’s so good in the kitchen. I can’t bake anything, but even I know store-bought kits are a travesty. They give gingerbread a bad name. Do you know how many kids have to be told every year that they can eat the gingerbread houses that they make at Grandma’s place? And then how many kids like it, even when they think they won’t?”

He slides a raised-brow look at me.

I lean back in my seat and sigh. “I can love Tinsel and care about my family’s business and still not be the right person to live here and take over.”

“I had the same conversation with my grandpa two years ago. About living here. Not about taking over the Emporium. Similar enough, though, I suppose.” He squeezes my knee, and it takes every ounce of willpower that I possess to not jump at his touch.

Not because it’s bad.

More because it’s good .

Which is, I suppose, bad in its own way.

We need to be comfortable touching each other if we’re going to pull this off. Just another role. That’s all this is. One more role.

I’ve played parts opposite plenty of guys that I didn’t want to touch me in any other circumstances.

But between thinking Dane’s hot because he wants to end our family feud, the way he’s answered every single objection I could think to raise before I raised it, and the relatability of knowing he, too, prefers city living to Tinsel—I could be wrong, but I think I accidentally signed myself up for a very good fake fiancé.

Provided us carrying through with the charade for a week doesn’t give my grandma a real heart attack.

I would not be doing this if I thought it was putting her at risk of anything more than swallowing her pride.

He’s right. The animosity needs to end.

We pass downtown, which means we’re about three minutes from his grandparents’ house.

“Tell me again who I’m meeting tonight and what I have to say to each of them to convince them that I’m not out to steal the Fruitcake Emporium,” I say.

I’m in. I’m in all the way.

And I’ll be the best fake fiancée Dane could ask for in the process, and I’ll win over his family.

I have to.

If I don’t, if we can’t pull this off—I don’t want to think about what it’ll mean for either of our futures.

Nothing will be the same after this.

I just hope we can make it better instead of worse.

Comments

0 Comments
Best Newest

Contents
Settings
  • T
  • T
  • T
  • T
Font

Welcome to FullEpub

Create or log into your account to access terrific novels and protect your data

Don’t Have an account?
Click above to create an account.

lf you continue, you are agreeing to the
Terms Of Use and Privacy Policy.