Chapter 5 Dane

Chapter 5

Dane

Amanda’s up early, moving through the kitchen fixing coffee not much later than the sun.

Guessing she slept about as well as I did last night.

Wonder if she’s having second thoughts about continuing our fake engagement.

I’m not—while I might not have slept great, I don’t have regrets about our plan. A small amount of guilt that Lorelei will be disappointed when I don’t marry Amanda, yes. But any regrets about putting myself in a position to make my family choose between me and the feud?

Nope.

Especially since someone clearly knows something more about our family histories than we do, and decided it was time we were let in on some old, old secrets.

I pull myself off the couch, stretch, and head into the small kitchen with Amanda. Chili stays behind, moving only to yawn and put his head back down on his quilt bed.

Coffeepot’s making noises while she stares, again, at the letter that someone dropped off here sometime since she arrived. We left it on the scarred oak kitchen table when we went to bed last night after both of us read it a dozen or more times.

“Do you think it’s a warning?” she asks.

I shake my head. “I don’t know what it is.”

Technically speaking, I know what it is.

It’s a letter, written by my great-great-great-grandmother in the late 1800s to my great-great-great-great-aunt Lucy, who hadn’t yet come to America from Germany.

And it spells out very clearly that a man named George Anderson had left my great-great-grandmother Maud brokenhearted after leaving her days before their wedding to marry a trollop —my great-great-great-grandmother’s word—named Minnie.

There’s no question that Maud is my great-great-grandmother and that Lucy is my great-great-great-great-aunt.

Uncle Rob and Dad got Grandpa and Grandma a printed family tree going back ten generations for Christmas when I was in high school. I was fascinated with it. Used to go to their house to stare at it hanging over their mantel. Been a few years, but I know where I come from.

I know the names.

But I don’t know what it means that someone delivered a copy of this letter to the mailbox where Amanda’s staying. Beyond that I’m in this fake engagement until we get answers to this too.

“I tossed and turned all night wondering if this is why our families don’t get along,” Amanda says. “I don’t know all of my relatives back that far the way you do, but George Anderson ? That can’t be a coincidence, can it? And then I started wondering why George and Maud broke up. Was Minnie pregnant with George’s baby? Was there some kind of arranged-marriage situation somewhere? Was Maud really brokenhearted? Or was that the family’s story, and Maud actually broke George’s heart? No, please, don’t get offended, this isn’t about your family specifically. Or even mine. It’s just a thing I wonder after the number of plays and musicals I’ve read and seen. I’d ask the same thing about any family letter like this.”

“There might be more.”

“Right? The number of possibilities of what actually happened could be endless.”

“More letters.”

She stares at me.

I tap the letter. It’s not original—it’s a photocopy. “We need to figure out where this came from.”

“Your family. Has to be. Mine doesn’t know where the feud started.”

I suck in a deep breath and pinch my eyes closed.

“I didn’t mean that in the offensive way,” she adds quickly. “I’m not implying your family does and they’re lying. I promise, I’m not.”

“I’m not offended.”

“You look offended.”

“I’d like a cup of coffee before I remind you that any of our relatives could be guilty. They could’ve started fighting for any reason from George and Maud to someone breaking someone else’s window a hundred years ago. Which isn’t about you or me.”

She stares at me again.

Clearly, we both need coffee.

Or possibly something stronger, considering that her eyes are getting shiny and her chin’s starting to wobble.

Fuck.

I hold my hands up in supplication. “I don’t care who’s at fault. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they all pull their heads out of their asses and quit making it so that if our kids want to get married someday, they don’t have to go through this .”

So Tinsel’s mayor doesn’t have to continuously intervene to keep one of our families from sabotaging the other during parades and cookie bake-offs and snowman-building contests. So I can have one conversation with my family that doesn’t remind me of how mean and petty they can be. So that Lorelei can have dinner with Amanda when she’s in town without the two of them having to sneak around to make it happen.

Hell, they could even publicly be friends on social media.

Wouldn’t that be something?

Amanda swipes her eyes and turns away, staring at the coffee maker instead of me. “I know. I know. I just—you’re so logical and smart and you know exactly what we need to do, and why, and how, and I’m just—I’m not . I got you into this and you’re doing all of the planning and the why s and I’m just daydreaming about a romance gone wrong well over a century ago.”

You’re so smart, Dane. Look at those grades. Look at what a good job you have. Those Andersons can’t touch what we’ve got in you. Ignorant assholes. We made sure they saw the write-up of you and your volunteer work at the dog shelter too. They acted like they didn’t see it, but we know they did.

Sometimes, I want to daydream about a romance gone wrong, too, but hell if I’ve ever been able to admit it out loud.

“You ate half a fruitcake last night,” I say instead. “You’re definitely pulling your weight.”

“ I like fruitcake. Especially your family’s fruitcake. I’ve tried fruitcake all over New York City, and nothing else comes close. I meant it when I said I order it under my roommate’s name. You can check the receipts. There are probably two a year from Yazmin, which is really me ordering as her.”

If she weren’t an Anderson, my family would be thrilled that we’re engaged. Even Lorelei doesn’t like the family fruitcake, which is the biggest reason she’s not working at the Fruitcake Emporium.

“So you’re still in? We’re still engaged for the next six days or until our families come around on their own?” I ask her.

She looks at the letter, then back at me. “I don’t know if this will solve my problems at the bakery, but I know the town deserves to have our families’ feuding end. Even if it all goes to hell, we’ll know one day our own great-grandchildren will read the social media posts about how we tried to fix it, and that’ll have to be enough.”

“No boyfriends for you, but you want kids?” I ask, then instantly regret it.

Yes, Amanda, I paid very close attention to how you feel about dating. That’s the most important part.

But she just smiles. “I never wanted a fiancé either, but look at us now.”

The coffee maker stutters the end of its cycle, and she leaps to grab two mugs. “Sugar? Cream? Milk? Iced to brace ourselves for another day of this awful heat? I should know how you like your coffee.”

“With good company.”

“So somewhere else.”

“Hey. Nobody’s their best before coffee. And you’re very good company.” I step behind her and settle my hands on her shoulders.

She stiffens but almost immediately relaxes and leans back into me, and for one more split second, I wonder what it would be like if this was real.

If I was in a real relationship with Amanda.

“Thank you for lying to me,” she says.

“Who do you keep in your life who makes you feel like you’re not good company? They need to go.”

“Just me.”

“How do you take your coffee?”

“Intravenously, preferably.”

“Second choice? I need to know since we’re engaged.”

“Eggnog lattes are my favorite. Heavy on the eggnog.”

“Seriously?”

“They’re delicious.”

“I know. They’re my favorite too.”

She looks up at me, blinks twice, and then grins. “No way.”

“Favorite part of coming home is that you can get eggnog year-round here.”

“ Mine too. But I can’t say that in front of my mom or grandma. They’ll think it’s code for I want to move home .”

“I tell Lorelei sometimes. She doesn’t believe me.”

Amanda slides out of my hands and skips to the fridge. “Have you ever had it on ice? I think today calls for iced eggnog lattes.”

“Agreed.”

She turns with the eggnog, then slides a look at the wide doorway from the kitchen into the living room. “Well, good morning, lazybones. Finally decided to join us, did you?”

Chili saunters into the room and snorts at both of us.

I take him out while Amanda finishes our eggnog lattes.

It’s still early, but you can already feel the heat starting to rise. Steam lingers on a lake beyond the pine trees. The morning birds seem muted, like they, too, would rather go hang in a pool than hunt for food when it’s this hot.

Amanda steps out onto the back porch with both of our coffees before Chili’s found the perfect spot to do his business. He’s not prone to wandering—that would take effort—so I’ve let him off his leash to find whatever he wants to find out here.

She hands me an oversize snowman mug with ice floating in the tan liquid. “Do you have your phone on you? We should go over your questionnaire now and worry about that letter later. Grandma and Mom will start calling soon about me bringing you to the bakery to meet them, so I should know more things about you and vice versa.”

“Pretty good logic there,” I murmur while I pull my phone out of my pocket.

“I’m trying.”

“Of the two of us, you’re far more likely to pull this off without a slip.”

She wrinkles her nose, but then she sips her coffee.

It’s like watching her eat fruitcake all over again with the way her eyes close and her head lifts, highlighting the curly tendrils of hair not tucked into her bun wrapping the base of her long neck. She sighs in satisfaction, sips again, and sighs deeper with a soft mmm .

Whatever Amanda thinks she’s lacking in strategic planning for a fake engagement, she makes up for in spades with the emotions that radiate out of her pores.

Ecstasy over coffee. Joy over my dog. Worries over her family. Eagerness to prove her worth.

I sip my coffee too.

Damn good latte.

“Okay. Let’s do this,” she says. “First question.”

I clear my throat and look down at my phone as I realize I’ve been staring at her. “Favorite food.”

“Breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, or snack food?”

I blink at her.

She starts to smile. “I like to eat. Don’t you have favorites for every meal?”

“That’s a question I’ve never been asked before.”

“Lucky day. I’ll bet I can come up with a few more. What’s your favorite meal? Not like, I like steak and eggs , but like, I never skip breakfast .”

“No steak.”

“Right. Mostly vegetarian. Will it bother you if I have a steak?”

I shake my head.

“Not that I eat a lot of steak,” she continues. “I’d rather buy a ticket to a Broadway show than blow my grocery budget on a steak.”

The way this doesn’t surprise me in the least has me smiling again. “What would you eat instead of going to a Broadway show?”

“Fruitcake.”

We stare at each other for a split second before we both crack up.

“I’m mostly serious and only a little kidding,” she says through giggles.

“I’ll get you a hookup so you never have to pick again.”

“My hero.”

Her eyes sparkle brighter than the holiday lights hung all over town year-round, and her laugh rings out more merrily than any Christmas bells.

Any doubts I had about lying to my family last night evaporate.

Ending our family’s fight will be worth it, and somehow, I’ll find a solution to her bakery problem at the same time.

It’ll set her free.

It’ll set all of us free.

Chili suddenly bolts to his feet.

My dog unexpectedly leaping up is concerning enough that I set my coffee down. “Chili? What’s up?”

A massive aroooooof! explodes out of his mouth, and then he’s gone, racing through the trees.

“Chili!” Amanda exclaims. “It’s just a squirrel!”

I dash off the porch, chasing after him.

My dog doesn’t run away.

My dog doesn’t run .

Unless he’s going to dinner.

Who knew Michigan squirrels counted as dinner?

And now that he’s running, I don’t know where he’ll end up.

Or how he’ll have the energy to get back.