Small Town Christmas Read online

  She snorted. “Nick sure could tell stories. But I can only remember one year when we got a dusting of snow. It was pitiful by snow standards. And it didn’t last very long.”

  “Well, I’m from Chicago, you know.”

  “So I reckon ya’ll have snow on the ground at Christmas all the time.”

  “Yeah. But in the city it doesn’t take very long for the snow to get dirty and gray. I always kind of imagined Last Chance covered in pristine white.”

  “Well, that’s a fantasy.” She reached her mother’s house on Oak Street. The old place needed a coat of paint, and a few of the porch balusters needed replacing. Annie ought to sell the place and move to Orangeburg or Columbia. A registered nurse could get a job just about anywhere these days. And her social life might improve if she moved to a bigger town.

  But she’d have to leave home. She’d have to leave friends. She’d have to leave the choir and the book club, not to mention Doc Cooper and the clinic.

  No wonder Miriam Randall had told her to get a cat. If she wanted to deal with her loneliness in Last Chance, a cat was probably her best bet.

  She pushed open the door and hit the switch for the hall and porch lights. Her Christmas lights—the same strand of large-bulbed lights that Mother had used for decades—blinked on.

  “Oh,” Matt said. It was less than a word and more than an exhalation.

  “I’m afraid it’s not much of a display. Nothing like the lights the Canadays put out every year.”

  She looked over her shoulder. Matt was smiling, the lights twinkling merrily in his eyes. A strange heat flowed through Annie that she recognized as attraction.

  Boy, she was really pathetic, wasn’t she?

  She shucked out of her coat and hung it on one of the pegs by the door.

  “It smells wonderful in here,” Matt said. He strolled past her into the front parlor. His presence filled up the space and made the large room seem smaller by half. He made a full three-sixty, inspecting everything, from the old upright piano to Grandmother’s ancient mohair furniture.

  Crap. Her house look like it belonged to a little old lady. Which, in fact, it had, until last spring, when Mother died. Suddenly the cabbage rose wallpaper and the threadbare carpet made Annie feel like a spinster. The cat would complete the picture.

  Matt stopped and cocked his head. “You have a tree.”

  “Of course I have a tree. Mother would—” She cut herself off. The last thing Matt wanted to hear about was what Mother expected out of Christmas. This year, Annie planned to make a few changes.

  But she’d still put out Mother’s old Christmas lights. And she had still bought a Douglas fir instead of a blue spruce.

  And she’d made the annual climb up to the attic for the ornaments. But when she’d gotten the boxes down to the front parlor, she’d lost the will to decorate. One look at her mother’s faded decorations, and she’d felt like her life was in a big rut.

  She’d done the unthinkable—she’d carried all those old boxes right back up to the attic. If she’d been a braver woman, she would have carried them to the curb for the trash man.

  Of course, she hadn’t done one thing about replacements. She had been putting all of that off. And suddenly, she realized that if she was going to take Matt up to Orangeburg tomorrow to visit Ruth, and still host a party for her friends from the book club, she was going to have to get her fanny in gear.

  Matt pulled in a deep breath, drinking in the Christmas tree aroma. He squeezed his eyes closed and could almost hear Nick’s voice, talking about how he’d helped his grandmother trim her tree.

  Annie’s tree was naked.

  He put the cat down on the carpet. She darted under the sofa, where she crouched, looking up at him as if he’d abandoned her.

  Stupid cat. She should realize that she had found a better home than he could provide. Annie’s house was like something out of a picture postcard. If Matt had had a grandmother, this is precisely the way he’d want her house to look.

  Matt had a feeling that Nick’s grandma’s house had been like this, too.

  He turned back toward Annie. She looked like a picture postcard too. Like Mom and apple pie. Like home.

  “So,” he said on a deep breath, “your tree needs help, Annie Roberts.”

  She gave him a bashful smile. “I guess it does.”

  “I’m willing to work for my room and board. Just point me in the direction of the lights.”

  She laughed. “Everything is up in the attic. Wait a sec, and I’ll go get the boxes.”

  She scurried away up the stairs in the main hall, and he amused himself watching her shapely backside, clad in a pair of blue jeans, as she climbed to the second story.

  Oh yeah, Annie Roberts was more than pretty. She was built. He could understand why Nick had had trouble forgetting her.

  “No, cat!” Annie tried to pull the feline away from the string of lights that Matt was hanging on the tree.

  “Maybe we should call her Pouncy,” he said with a deep, rumbling laugh.

  He stood rock steady on the stepladder. He’d taken off his army jacket and wore only a tan-colored T-shirt that hugged his torso. He looked fit.

  Okay, she was understating the fact. Matt looked gorgeous, and ripped, and competent standing there hanging tree lights.

  The cat, on the other hand, looked like a menace on four feet. The kitten had gotten over her fear of the new environment and had decided that the Christmas tree and anything associated with it was her personal play toy.

  Matt was no good at discouraging her either. He kept tugging on the string of lights, making them move suddenly in a way that the cat found irresistible. The kitten pounced ferociously on them and then backed up and pounced again.

  The cat was growing on Annie.

  But not as much as the man.

  “So, you said you have a Christmas gift for Ruth?” she asked, purposefully raising the specter of Nick. She really needed to remember that Matt had come to do something that was going to make Ruth unspeakably sad. And then he would go away, just like Nick had done. Best to keep her distance.

  “Yeah. Nick bought it for her a year and a half ago.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t even know where he bought it. I just know that I found it with his stuff after he died. I took it before the CO could lay his hands on it. Not exactly regulation, I know, but I kept thinking about Ruth getting Nick’s effects and finding it there. I thought it would be really crummy to get a gift and not have Nick there, you know? I thought it would be better to bring it myself.”

  She studied him for a very long time. He was a pretty sensitive guy for a soldier. Her opinion of him rose a little more. “You waited a long time.”

  He finished putting the lights on the tree and stepped down from the stepladder. “I was in Afghanistan. It was a long deployment.”

  Annie unwrapped the angel that Mother always put on the top of the tree. The angel wore yellow velvet with gold trim, and her halo had been broken years and years ago. She handed the tree topper to Matt, and their fingers touched. Heat flooded through her, and the look of longing in Matt’s eyes told her that the reaction was mutual. Matt let go of a big breath, as if he’d been holding something inside. They stood there for the longest moment, their fingers touching across the angel. Eventually Annie let go, and Matt turned, stepped up the ladder, and put the angel in her place.

  For some reason, the angel, even with her bent wings and broken halo, looked beautiful up there. Once, a long time ago, Annie had thought the angel was the most beautiful Christmas ornament ever. How had she forgotten that?

  Matt turned back toward her, his eyes filled with joy. “I love doing this,” he said. “I haven’t had much experience trimming trees. My folks used to put a little fake tree on the kitchen table when I was a kid. We always lived in a pretty small apartment.”

  Annie turned away, suddenly overcome by emotions she couldn’t name. Who was this stranger