“It’s going to be cold tonight,” Mom said idly on the other end of the phone. A thousand mini-concerns made Mom’s voice distant as she clicked on the various technical weather readouts on her laptop.

I was raised by an environmentally-minded family who made all natural, locally sourced, aloe vera-based bathing products.

My parents were a bunch of hippies who made soap. Or rather, they were until they retired. Now, it was my turn. It had always been my dream to run the family business, and now that I was in control…

I was terrified.

“Yeah, I hear Florida is supposed to drop to a freezing eighty-one degrees. Has the governor issued a state of emergency yet?” I responded, equally distracted as I shuffled through various past-due notices on my desk. I organized the bills by date and general nastiness, then put them in the filing cabinet next to my computer.

It was a lovely game I got to play every month called “How the hell is Genny going to get out of this mess?”. I was doing everything I could think of to keep us afloat, including branching out into new markets.

“There’s a cold front coming in from Canada,” Mom said, missing my reply completely. She, of course, was talking about the weather here in Texas, not there in their Florida condo. “It’s supposed to drop eight degrees tonight. I know the shop isn’t insulated as well as it should be.”

“Good thing one of the mixers caught fire then,” I replied, mustering up a sliver of a smile. “Warmed the place right up.”

You’ll have to adjust the temperature on the melter tanks to make up for the difference. Have you done that yet?” Mom asked, again ignoring my reply.

“The what now?” I asked, feigning ignorance. “Oh, you mean the water-jacketed oil and wax soap-melting, heater tanks? The most critical piece of equipment in the shop that I’ve been trained to use since before I got my braces off?” I briefly let the stale air of exasperation linger long enough to drive my point home. “Nah. Sold that for drugs.”

It had been eight months since I inherited everything from my parents and it wasn’t until recently that I realized just how much trouble the family business was in. Forty years ago we had three buildings and ten employees. Dad had to sell everything, but this main warehouse, early last year just to pay off all of the mounting debt.

They had kept a lot of the financial stress from my sister and me to protect us.

I wish they hadn’t. Then maybe I could’ve helped, or at least been more prepared for when I took over. There were just too many options out there for soap now, we couldn’t compete anymore. Shepherd Soaps was in serious trouble.

And that was before the fifty-thousand-dollar bank loan I took out in secret.

December was going to make or break us.

I checked Etsy and a few other sites where I had secretly listed a few products under a different company name. Soap might be dying, but the new stuff I listed was taking off like crazy! I checked the shipping manifest for the special gear I’d ordered with that bank loan. It was on its way.

The sudden, unexpected success of our new line of products came with its own difficulties. To meet the demand and keep my seller rating up I needed different equipment, expensive equipment. Up until now I’d been making due with what we had here, but if orders picked up for the holiday season like I hoped they would, I’d be screwed if I didn’t have the right gear.

“Genevieve…” Mom sighed, concern heavy in her voice. I knew they just wanted to help any way they could.

“No. No more questions. Sorry, you’ve hit your daily allotment.” I protested, taking the moment to stand up and stretch my sore back. I’d spent too long hunched over my work desk agonizing over bills. “The thing about being retired is…you have to retire. Stop worrying. I got this.”

I glanced around my cramped office looking for my coffee. It was going to be another long night and I needed to be about a hundred times less exhausted than I was. The office was actually a pretty good size, but it was currently crammed full of all my stuff from my old apartment. I spotted my mug which was resting on top of a Tetris stack of books on my entertainment center. I kicked my shoes off and stepped on the cot I’d been sleeping on to grab it.

It didn’t make sense to keep my apartment when I spent so much time at work. But that might be changing too. My shipment of aloe vera was a few days late, and after tonight I’d be out of all the inventory I already had. Almost every product I sold had aloe in it; if I didn’t get more soon, I’d be sitting on my hands looking at orders I couldn’t fill.

It would’ve been so much easier to just find another aloe farm, there were dozens, maybe even hundreds of them in the country. But none of them had a natural purple hue to them. I didn’t know how the Copas were growing their crops, but we’d built our brand around that signature color.

Granted I could’ve dyed the product, but then I’d have to undergo a ton of additional state tests and would’ve had to make all new packaging for both the soap and the...other products.

Between all the graphic design costs for the new labels, government testing fees, and higher shipping costs to import aloe from across the country, or world, it was still crazily cheaper to deal with Copa’s price gouging.

And that wasn’t even mentioning the small town politics that would’ve sunk my business if I wasn’t careful.

Why was everything always so stressful?

“Genevieve,” Mom said, after a long pause. “I know we didn’t leave you the business in the best situation. The turn in the economy, and a few bad investments…”

“Mom, it’s OK.” I tried lightening my tone. It was all I could do to shake off the dark mood that was falling over me.

“We need you to know that if things get too bad you have our blessing to sell Shepherd Soaps. We don’t want you to start getting harassed by the bank, your father went through that and it was just horrible.”

Hearing her say that was ice water down my throat.

“Mom.” I struggled to swallow.

“Your father and I talked about this at length. He agrees. You won’t get much for it, especially when you split the money with your sister, but it might be enough for you two to get started at college or whatever you want to do.”

“NO.” I snapped harsher than I meant. “Mom, Shepherd Soaps has been in our family for three generations. It’s not dying with me.” Not to mention, the thought of my lazy sister getting half the payout from selling the business made my stomach turn. She was more concerned with her YouTube followers than our family legacy.

“Everything is fine.” I laughed to keep the anxiety from my voice. “Great, in fact! This could be our best season in years. We’re getting more orders in like crazy.”

Just not orders for soap.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them that our last soap distributor canceled their order with us earlier today, and I sure-as-hell didn’t have the courage to tell them what I was selling that was actually bringing money in.

“Alright,” Mom begrudgingly relented. “Well, that’s good.”

I exhaled away from the phone so that she couldn’t hear my relief. They’d done so much for us it was time that they were able to relax and finally live their own lives.

“But ask Amber to help you. I don’t like you doing everything on your own.”

“Sure. I’ll ask her.” It was hard not to scoff at the thought. I asked my sister for help all the time, but she was always too busy with her social media campaigns.

Even now I could hear Amber in the store part of the building, but knew she wasn’t setting up the Christmas decorations like I asked. More than likely she was just stealing some of the merchandise because her apartment upstairs had run out. She was talking to someone despite it being way too late for any customers. She was probably recording another YouTube video.

“About Christmas this year,” Mom started. The sound of regret in her voice made me realize immediately where this was going.

“Aw Mom, really?” I whined.

“Between flight costs and getting settled here, it’s just not going to be possible. I’m sorry sweetie.” Mom went on to give me other reasons as well, but none of them lifted the weight on my heart.

Maybe it was just because of all the stress or not seeing them in well over half a year, but hearing they weren’t coming home for the holidays really bummed me out. With everything moving so fast this year I’d been longing for a sense of familiarity. It had been so hard lately that I needed something good in my life; I needed good people like my parents.

Good people like…

My mind started to drift when I heard a deeper voice answer one of Amber’s questions. A voice I hadn’t heard in a long time, but one that was unmistakably familiar.

It couldn’t be after all this time, could it?

“Mom, I gotta go. We have a customer.”

“OK, sweetie. Good luck!” Mom perked up at the thought of a customer.

I leaped out of my sad, makeshift office bed and was out the door before I good fully say, “Love you, bye.”

There was no way.

Amber’s whisper-talk voice, she thought was sexy, prattled on about something that was too low to actually make out. My mind had to be playing tricks on me! It’d been so many years. I was probably just mis-remembering it. My heart started to race, and my hands and the back of my neck started to flush with heat.

With a quickness I thought I was too tired for, I dashed past the melting tanks, forming station and soap-curing racks of the manufacturing room, and reached for the door that would’ve led me into the storefront.

He spoke again and it stopped me dead on the other side of that door. His deep, smooth voice was like a shot of my favorite whiskey. It burned in all the right ways, but for all the wrong reasons.

I cracked open the door and there, beyond my shamelessly flirting sister, was Kade Houston. My pounding, wounded heart still had the cracks in it from the last time I saw him. He was exactly how I remembered, but so different at the same time.

Standing taller and straighter than I’d ever seen him, Kade had filled out in our years apart. His military-cut dark brown hair was as short and neat as I imagined it would be, but almost everything else had changed. Gone was his thin, athletic frame. The Kade that stood before me now was filled out, burly even, but not in the same way of an after work gym rat. It was hard to explain. I didn’t know if I could put my finger on it. Maybe it was just in the way he carried himself now. It looked like every pound of densely-packed muscle he had was hard earned in training or in combat. If he was anyone else, seeing such a large man suddenly in my shop would be terrifying.

I swallowed all the old giddiness I used to get whenever he was around. Nostalgia, yearning, fantasy, heartbreak, and a hundred other emotions all churned in my chest and burned like wildfire. I played out this exact scenario for years but never thought it would actually happen. He looked incredibly manly in his thick coat and jeans, but much to my surprise, he hadn’t lost the boyish dimples that made girls crumble around him.

I hated how excited I felt when his smoldering, hickory eyes flicked past Amber and landed on me. I felt smothered in them - like drowning in dark honey.

Seeing how handsome he’d become ripped the air from my lungs. When I finally mustered up the courage I stormed into the room. The fire escaped my chest and flashed over the rest of my body, the heat growing more intense with every step closer to him. No, not heat...anger.

I didn’t even try to keep the growl from my voice. “You’ve got some fucking balls to show up here after what you did.”