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All her anxiety had given her a plan for the pages she needed to write tonight, a scene that cried out for the emotion she was fighting so hard not to feel in real life.
She turned in at her driveway, pausing to collect the mail from the black metal box that still bore the dents from an unfortunate mailbox-baseball incident on Halloween. She should replace it, but every little penny...
* * *
ON THURSDAY MORNING, Fleming waited outside Jason’s office, uncertain whether she was more anxious about seeing him or dealing with the loan.
Voices rose loudly inside the office. Instantly concerned that someone else might be attacking Jason, Fleming glanced at Hilda, who grimaced and stared at her phone. “I have 911 on speed dial now,” the woman said.
“I’m sorry you have to. It’s just a bad time of year for this to happen.”
Hilda scrunched up her eyebrows. “But if he’d waited, some people would have lost their homes and businesses.”
“I’m one of them,” Fleming said without thinking.
“What a mess.”
The office door opened and Jason came out, his arm across the shoulders of a man in coveralls. Fred Limber, who owned a tire shop a few blocks from the square.
“So don’t worry. I’ll send you the terms. I don’t see any reason you can’t meet this obligation, Fred, and if you have problems, you get in touch with me.”
“I can’t afford your advice on my business, Jason.”
“My name is on this bank.” Jason wiped his free hand down his leg, as if it were sweating. “I can spare you the time.”
Fleming stood, and both men looked at her. Jason’s gaze, warm with a smile, made her heart seize in a funny, clenching cramp. She smoothed the skirt of her navy shift dress.
He didn’t believe in Santa? With his offers to help the people who were in trouble thanks to Mr. Paige, it was like he was carrying around a big old sack of gifts.
Fred turned and shook Jason’s hand. “Sorry for yelling at you.”
“Sorry for yelling back.”
“I’ll read those papers and talk to my brother. He’s an accountant. Then I’ll set up an appointment with Hilda.”
“Good. We’ll see you then.” Jason walked Fred to the door, and after he shut it, he leaned against the heavy wood for a second. He might pretend to be detached, but clearly, walking away from the problems he was making for people in Bliss was not as easy as he might have thought. He smiled at Fleming, and then rubbed his hand over his mouth. “I know you don’t make coffee, Hilda—”
“No, I don’t.”
“But—”
“Just this once.” She rose from behind her desk. “Want one, Fleming?”
With brandy, for goodness’ sake. “Yes, please.”
“I’ll bring it in.”
Jason went into his office and Fleming followed.
“Where do we start?” he asked.
No need to beat around the bush. “I’m going to save the store.”
“Are you sure?” He took a stack of papers from his desk and then came to the sofa, where she’d already taken the same seat she’d occupied the other day.
“Maybe I can help you, too.” He lifted the first page and glanced toward the doorway. “Like with Fred,” he said.
It seemed clear that he was trying to tell her he didn’t care more for her than he should. She was just another victim of the bank’s bad loan officer.
She knew Jason’s plans. He was leaving town as soon as he finished this unwelcome favor.
“I’m happy to take advice,” Fleming said, purposefully rejecting the idea that it would come straight from him.
“I have a few suggestions.”
“But you won’t be here.” She closed her eyes briefly, determined to fight her own inner demons. Since the day her father had walked out of her life, she’d mistrusted men in authority. And yet let a guy go out of his way to help someone, and she couldn’t restrain herself from being attracted. “And I can’t entirely trust a bank that agrees I can afford their loan.”
“I’m not pretending it will be easy, but maybe we can streamline your processes in the shop to save some overhead. Spend more wisely.”
She lifted her chin. “The shop is still mine. I make the decisions.”
“You have three days to change your mind, Fleming. Don’t let the deadline pass.”
CHAPTER FIVE (#ud9f8e295-b3cb-5612-b5a3-34d995d4522e)
AFTER ENDURING FRED’S shouting and Fleming’s prickly mood, Jason ducked past the registration desk in the hotel that night. It usually took a few weeks for him to get this anxious to leave a work site.
He’d made a mistake. He should have stayed downstairs and asked if he had unexpected company, because a tall, thin woman in a worn dress was waiting beside his door. She blushed and smiled at him, but tears welled in her eyes.
“Mr. Macland?”
“Jason,” he said automatically.
“I’m Rachel Limber.”
“Fred’s wife?” Should he brace for a fight or help her down the stairs?
She held out a Santa-decorated tin. “I make homemade fudge,” she said. “It’s really good, and right now it’s pretty much all we have to offer as a thank-you.”
“Oh.” He took the metal container and shook her hand at the same time. “You didn’t have to go to the trouble.”
“I wanted to. Fred came home hopeful, and for that, I owe you. That old shop of his is mud and oil and nasty smells, but only to me. To him, it’s his favorite place in the whole world. I don’t know what he’d do if he lost it.”
That sounded familiar. Fleming had said the same thing—how many times? “I guess some walls and a place with memories can matter that much, Mrs. Limber.”
“It does to Fred. I was ready to give up and move to Knoxville, but our family’s here.”
Jason smiled. “Remind Fred he can call me or email anytime.”
“Thanks.” She looked at him closely. “I knew your grandmother.”
His grandparents had sold their home and moved to New York to help with Jason. Their support had become ever more vital to his father, who’d managed to retain custody of Jason’s younger sisters and brother as he divorced their mothers.
Robert Macland’s parents had given the family stability. Safety.
“I don’t think she ever came back here. She or my grandfather.” Jason had taken his grandparents so much for granted that he’d never thought to ask if they missed the place.
Why hadn’t he asked? Self-absorption must be a genetic trait.
“I wish she had. She was good friends with my mom. I know she would have been welcome.” Rachel Limber hooked her purse more securely over her arm and turned toward the stairs. “People shouldn’t disappear from each other’s lives. That’s what I hate most about this bank thing. You’re helping Fred, but you were too late for some.”
He nodded. “My grandfather asked me to come and to move quickly.”
“Good people, your grandparents, but we all knew your father. This little world was never going to be big enough for him. Merry Christmas, Jason. I hope I’ll see you around town.”
He stared after her, listening to the clack of her heels on the wooden stairs. Hadn’t he said almost the same thing about his father to Fleming? The small town of Bliss seemed to be closing in on him.
In his suite, Jason tossed the big key that weighed down his jacket pocket onto a table in front of the fireplace. He set the tin of fudge beside it.
Aromas from downstairs drifted up. His stomach growled as he glanced at the mail. He considered phoning down for dinner, but then rejected the idea, striking a long match to the logs and kindling waiting on the hearth.
He turned back to the stack of letters that he’d collected from his temporary post office box. Even in an age where a man did most of his correspondence via email, he still received a bundle of mail most days.
A long, lavender envelope caught his eye. Not the envelope, but the penmanship. Fat, round writing that was familiar because he’d read every line in every one of the day planners his mother had left behind when she’d abandoned him and his father. He stared at the name on the return address: Teresa Macland Brown.
It left him feeling as dazed as if he’d stormed headfirst into a wall.
His mother had written to him?
She’d hardly ever bothered. No cards, no emails, though he’d written to her almost the first moment he’d set up his own email address. He’d searched for her contact information on his father’s computer.
Secretly. Because Robert had been so angry at his wife’s disappearance that he had discouraged Jason from trying to get in touch with her. He’d reminded Jason regularly that she would only hurt him again.
Jason had never forgotten that last morning with her.
After an earsplitting argument between his parents, Jason’s mother had called a porter to take her luggage down to the street, and then she’d left. Jason sneaked into the elevator of their Manhattan loft to follow her, but she didn’t even wait for her bags. She was running out of the building’s other elevator as the doors opened on Jason’s.
He hurried after her, but when he reached the glass doors in the lobby, someone tall grabbed his shoulders and jerked him back.
“Careful, son, that’s a busy street out there.” It was the doorman.
Jason’s mother had run, sobbing, into the arms of a pale-haired man. He’d tipped up her face and wiped at her cheekbones with his thumbs. Then he’d kissed her with a tenderness that made Jason feel sick, because the man wasn’t his dad.
The runaway couple had scrambled into a waiting cab as if they couldn’t escape fast enough. With a jolt, the vehicle had started forward, and his mother and the stranger had disappeared into the flow of traffic.
She’d never looked back.
She’d hardly ever called. Initially, his father had tried to make excuses for her. For that, Jason had been grateful, but that image of her grabbing her new man and running away from their life stuck in his head even today.
No explanations had ever been necessary.
She hadn’t loved his father or him enough to stay. His dad said staying in one place wasn’t her thing, and he couldn’t blame her for that when he suffered from the same affliction. But Jason had never understood what he’d done to make her leave him, too.
Finally, he’d told his dad he understood that his mother didn’t love him, and they’d never discussed her again. She’d called once or twice, and they’d talked like strangers. Then they’d stopped talking at all.
Tightening his jaw, Jason finally opened the ridiculously feminine envelope. A single page slid out onto the floor. He picked it up. Heavy writing had impressed the pale purple paper with a few lines that showed through the back of the sheet. He needn’t have dreaded a long explanation, or an excuse.
But how had she known where to find him? How long had she been keeping tabs on him?
He unfolded the piece of paper. She wrote the way she’d talked all those years ago, as if she still didn’t have a lot to say. Just his name, a diffident request to meet, “I want to talk to you,” and her phone number.
He’d had more emotional communication from the bank’s frightened clients. He dropped the brief note and envelope on a side table with his keys.
After all these years, that was her best effort?
Why now? Why here?
How badly did he want to know?
He changed into running clothes and headed downstairs. The slap of his shoes against the sidewalk felt good. The stretch of his muscles as he ran and the cold air biting into his face reminded him he was alive. He was working. Nothing here was permanent. He just had to keep running to put everything back into perspective.
But then he came to Fleming’s shop, where she was stringing lights along the window. For a second, he considered running on past, but he couldn’t leave her standing on a chair to handle the lights alone.
He stopped, breathing hard enough to cause a cloud of steam to form in front of his face. Fleming, tangled in lights, stared at him as if to ask what he wanted.
If she’d asked out loud, he wouldn’t have known how to answer. He wasn’t even certain how he’d ended up in the one place she was sure to be. “Why don’t you let me help you?”
She looked down at him, considering. “I can do this by myself.”
Ignoring her stubbornness, he put his hand on the back of the chair. “Do we really need this?” He reached up to the metal frame of the awning in front of Mainly Merry Christmas. It was about four inches higher than his fingertips. “I guess we do.”
He took off his hoodie so he could see what he was doing and traded places with Fleming on the chair, noticing as they passed each other, just shy of touching, that she couldn’t look away from him any more than he could tear his gaze from her.
Slowly, she handed him a roll of green duct tape that matched the awning. She’d been using it to fasten the light cords to the canvas. She lifted the string of lights, and he took it, leaning back to see how she’d been lining them up.
“Why are you angry with me, Fleming?”
“I’m not.” She said it in such a rush it was obviously untrue. “I’m sorry. Maybe I am lashing out a little, because I find myself in a bad situation.”
“You can afford this loan. You won’t lose the store.”
“Why are you so helpful? You act as if the bank’s at fault.”
“I guess it is.” He probably shouldn’t say that. “According to the attorneys, Paige kept the loans just this side of legal so they’d go through the system. He’ll be going to jail because he got greedy enough to skim the profits.”
“Otherwise, the bank would have been part of his scam,” she said.
“I guess my family does have a level we won’t stoop below.” Jason smiled, but he wasn’t entirely joking. “I’m helping you and everyone else he cheated because it’s the right thing to do, and it’s best for this town if all of you can continue to do business with Macland’s.”
