Chapter Nine
“Okay. Who is ready to start piping?” Patty Hathaway held out two nozzle bags and Elsie and Betsy reached for them eagerly. “The first thing we need to do is assemble the houses, we’re going to use the icing as glue. Once they’re stable we can decorate and the only limits are your imaginations. Right, girls?”
“Right.” The girls echoed, their faces scrunched up in frowning concentration.
Linnea’s heart gave the all too familiar painful squeeze as she watched them work. Linnea had never dreamed of motherhood; the absolute love she felt for her daughters had taken her completely by surprise as had the knowledge she would do whatever it took to make them happy, to keep them safe. Such a primal feeling.
“Look, Mommy,” Betsy’s high-pitched voice recalled her to her surroundings.
“That’s wonderful, honey. I can’t thank you enough,” she added as Patty Hathaway gently guided Betsy to piece together her fairy tale-inspired cottage. “I think I could have helped them with a basic box-shaped house. Maybe. But nothing this elaborate. And my mom is an amazing cook, but she’s the first to admit that she has no artistic talent. She’s more of a throw-on-lots-of-icing-and-hope-for-the-best kind of cake decorator and I’m exactly the same.”
“I’m delighted to have a chance to help.” The elegant older woman reassured her. “Priscilla and I can’t enter the gingerbread competition of course, as professional bakers it would be most unfair, but I love making them. It’s lovely to have children in the kitchen again. They are welcome anytime. As are you,” she added with a shrewd glance at Linnea. “Crooked Corner has an open-door policy. There is always coffee, cake, and someone to talk to if you want it—or a warm chair if you prefer silence.”
The kitchen at Crooked Corner already felt like a familiar sanctuary. The girls and Patty sat at one end of the huge kitchen table, the pieces of carefully cutout gingerbread in front of them, bowls of icing and sweets to decorate ready at one side. Linnea had been settled on the comfortable shabby sofa by the stove and given a pile of magazines to flick through, but she had laid them to one side, content to watch her daughters work. Priscilla Hathaway was bustling around at the other end of the kitchen cooking something delicious-smelling. She had already insisted Linnea and the girls stay for dinner and Linnea had made only token protests.
“How are you finding being back in Marietta?” Patty asked as she moved her attention to helping Elsie with the more ambitious castle complete with turrets and a drawbridge.
“Good,” Linnea said. “A little strange in some ways. To find myself back living in my parents’ home, back working at the orchard. I mean, I didn’t leave and tell myself I’d never come back, but I didn’t expect to live here again. But it’s a good place to raise kids. I was happy here. I hope the girls will be too.”
“You never know where life will lead you,” Patty said, her eyes soft as she watched Elsie. “I thought I’d live out my days in Paris, I was very happy there with my little apartment in Montmartre, my friends, and my work. But one day I knew I had to come home. My heart ached for the mountains. For Montana air. But if someone had told me fifteen years ago that I would be living in Marietta with my sister-in-law and baking for a living I would have thought them quite mad. Yet here I am, and perfectly content.”
Linnea remembered the stir when Patty Hathaway had swept back from Paris with her designer wardrobe and cutting-edge style and moved into Crooked Corner with her recently-widowed sister-in-law. The two were such fixtures in Marietta it seemed as if they had lived at Crooked Corner forever, but they had both had lived full lives before, Patty as a model in Paris, Priscilla out at the Hathaway ranch with her husband. Life came in stages. Nothing was forever.
“I loved working for Logan’s parents,” she said. “They were always so supportive. Helped with Elsie when she was born, encouraged me to finish my degree, and although they gave me a job in their marketing department for family reasons they were very clear they promoted me because of merit. I needed that validation. I always did.” She stared at the glossy model on the cover of the magazine still lying in her lap. Linnea sympathized with her awkward pose, her too-bright smile. How many times had she tried to present her life as if it was as glossy, as air-brushed as any cover girl? Nothing but perfection for Linnea Olsen.
Maybe it was time to let some cracks show. She’d had to call in help for the concert after all.
“It couldn’t have been easy deciding to come home.”
“It wasn’t,” she admitted. “I had a lot of sleepless nights. I’ve always prided myself on doing the right thing, but I couldn’t see my way clear, there were so many competing loyalties, so many duties. But in the end I couldn’t bear to think of the orchard being sold and so here I am.”
Linnea looked up as the kitchen door swung open, her heart pounding as Nat walked in, closely followed by his sister. “Hello beloved aunts,” he said bestowing a wide grin on the girls and dropping a kiss on the top of Priscilla’s head. “I heard a rumor there might be food available for a hard-working musician.”
“Hello, Nat dear, welcome home, Lacey. Can one of you set the table? Linnea and the girls are staying too.”
Nat’s gaze found hers and Linnea’s cheeks heated.
“Hi,” he said softly.
“Hi.” The air stilled, charged, and Linnea dragged her gaze away. “Hey, Lacey. How are you?”
“Good.” Lacey was looking between Linnea and Nat her blue eyes, so like her brother’s, alight with interest. “Full of Christmas spirit thanks to a week filming at various Christmas markets—and I see I’m not the only one. Are you two making houses for the competition? I love them.” She pulled out a chair next to Elsie and sat down. To Linnea’s relief Elsie answered Lacey’s questions quite happily and within a couple of minutes was instructing Lacey to hold a still drying piece of the structure.
“It looks like a real production line in here,” Nat said as he strolled across the room and opened a drawer, scooping out great handfuls of cutlery.
“The girls are having such fun; they’re really looking forward to seeing their houses displayed in the competition. Here”—she pushed off the couch and took the cutlery out of his hands—“I’ll help.” She cringed internally as she spoke. At the false brightness in her voice, at the inanity of her words. But there were things she wanted to say that she couldn’t do in front of other people—especially Nat’s family and her own daughters. To ask him if he’d felt that strange currency running between them at the park the other evening. What it meant.
Linnea swallowed. The truth was that Nat’s presence discombobulated her. She felt eighteen again. Young and full of possibilities as attraction thundered through her veins. But she wasn’t eighteen and she couldn’t just follow her body’s lead. Last time they’d both had their sights set on a world outside Marietta. This time she was staying right here. With such different goals she couldn’t afford to get caught up in any rekindling of their old relationship.
Besides, Nat Hathaway was on the brink of stardom. If rumors were true he and Piper Flynn had been an item over the summer. He’d moved on in more ways than distance, why would he be interested in a single mom working in a small family business? The very thought was ludicrous.
She looked up only to still under the intensity of his gaze. For a moment the room faded away, the chatter just a background buzz as their eyes remained locked. Linnea couldn’t have said with any certainty what she was wearing, but she knew every detail of Nat by heart; the casual jeans, the thin sweater showcasing his broad shoulders and lean stomach, the taut muscles of his arms. The pull towards him was almost as irresistible as it was terrifying. Lacey’s bell-like voice, breaking the illusion, was a relief. Linnea looked away, her mouth dry and pulse hammering, walking as casually as she could to her daughter’s side to begin to help with her design.
It had been a long time since she’d had such a visceral, such a physical reaction to a man. Logan and she had been catapulted into parenthood, into responsibility so fast; they seemed to find it easier to act as co-parents, as partners rather than lovers. Which was maybe to be expected at forty, but had seemed depressing at twenty-four. Sometimes she saw her life looming ahead, the girls growing up leaving her with empty years to somehow fill. But she had never looked elsewhere, never even indulged in a light flirtation and nor, as far as she knew, had Logan. She respected him far too much. Instead, she had told herself that the fizz of attraction was overrated.
She’d been lying.
Tearing her gaze away, she started to set the table. “How’s the dog? The girls are dying to visit, but I thought he might want to settle in first.
“He’s doing great. Bring them along anytime. He’s clean, flea-free, and, so far, seems to have perfect manners.”
“I will.” She paused, strangely tongue-tied, relieved as Priscilla Hathaway called out that dinner was ready and she could take her seat between her girls and join in the general conversation.
“Have you two decided what you’re going to do for the concert yet?” Lacey asked as she cleared the plates off the table.
“We haven’t had a chance to talk about it, dog-gate rather took matters over,” Nat confessed. “Linnea, any thoughts?”
“It needs to be simple,” she said. “We don’t have much time. But if Lacey is filming it, then it needs to be effective. Simple, but effective, I sure know how to keep things easy!”
“How about an old-fashioned Christmas?” Patty suggested. “Marietta in days gone by? Girls in long skirts, boys in suits, and sing traditional carols. That would be easy to arrange, Nat, easy for us to sort out costumes and would sound beautiful.”
“That could work.” Nat’s eyes were unfocused and he stayed silent for a time before looking up with a snap of his fingers. “Linnea, Lacey, Elsie, Betsy come with me.”
Exchanging a startled glance with Elsie, Linnea obediently followed Nat through to the den. Once again it stuck her how little Nat had changed since high school. Scruffy, dark blond hair still fell over his brow, navy blue eyes still laughed as if nothing needed to be taken seriously, a smile still hovered around his well-cut mouth—but he’d filled out, his shoulders broader, his jeans fitting muscular thighs perfectly. Not that she should be noticing his thighs, Linnea scolded herself, or the perfection of his backside as she followed him all the way to the piano, obediently sitting when he told her to.
He pulled up a stool next to her, lifting a guitar out of the corner after handing a violin to a protesting Lacey. “Nat! I only play for fun. This might not even be in tune.”
“You were nearly a professional, you’ll manage,” he said turning to Elsie. “Okay, young lady. Do you know all the words to Away in a Manager?”
Elsie tilted her chin haughtily. “Since I was five.”
“Excellent. How about you Betsy?”
“Some,” Betsy half whispered leaning against Linnea a little bashfully.
“Some will do perfectly. Okay, what we are going to do is let Lacey play the first verse through on her own…”
“I’m what?”
Nat ignored his sister’s indignant squeak. “And then she is going to accompany Elsie, very softly, as Elsie sings the first verse solo, and then we’ll all join in, Linnea and I will play and sing and the aunts will join in as well.”
“And will I be allowed to sing or am I too old?” an autocratic voice demanded.
Nat grinned over at the door. “Mrs. Hoffmann, I would never dare say such a thing, would you like a solo or are you content with being part of the chorus?”
“The chorus will suffice, thank you, Nat,” the elderly lady made her way slowly to the love seat and sat upon it straight-backed, as if she were receiving tribute. Nat waited until she was settled and his aunts were comfortable and then nodded at Lacey who had been frantically tuning her violin while they settled themselves.
Despite her protestations the violin soared, carrying the age-old tune into every corner of the room, in a plaintive song. Linnea could hardly breathe as each lingering note played out—and then Elsie took over.
“Away in a manger, no crib for a bed.” The whole room stilled as her voice rang out, true and sweet. Tears prickled Linnea’s eyes and she stared at the piano keys, fighting the lump in her throat. She’d always known Elsie could carry a tune, but this almost mournful beauty was something else. “Asleep in the hay,” her daughter finished and there was a hushed silence before Nat played the next note on his guitar and Linnea quickly found her place on the keyboard and joined in.
They all sang the next two verses, Nat’s well-known tenor holding the tune joined by Lacey’s soprano and Patty’s rich contralto, everyone else pitching somewhere in between. Lacey picked her violin back up as they finished and played the refrain, the last haunting note reverberating round the room as they all fell silent. Linnea put an arm around Elsie and held her close as the note finally came to a close. “Well done, darling,” she whispered. “You were wonderful.”
Nat nodded over at her, his eyes bright. “I think this will work, Linnea Olsen, you shall have your Christmas concert. Let’s get to work.”
Elsie’s eyes were shining with anticipation and hope surged so fast it almost hurt. It had been months since Linnea had seen that look on her daughter’s face. Organizing this concert might just have been the right decision after all—and thanks to Nat it might even be a success.