Twelve Dates of Christmas: The Ballad of Lula Jo (Lonesome Point) (2 page)

“What are we doing?” Carter asked as he tied the reindeer to a lamppost.

Lula held a finger to her lips and motioned for him to follow her. They moved soundlessly through the grass to the edge of Louise’s lawn. A glance at the windows revealed lights on in the family room, but the kitchen window that overlooked the front yard was dark.

“I’m going to go for the little elf gnome with the stocking on his head this year,” Lula whispered, pointing to the center of the display. “What do you think? Isn’t he a cutie?”

“You’re going to…” Carter’s words trailed off as he turned to her with a smile. “You’re the Gnome Bandit!”

Lula grinned. “Ten years running.”

Carter shook his head as his dark eyes skimmed her up and down, his heated look enough to make her skin tingle. “Just when I thought you couldn’t get any more irresistible. If you weren’t in the middle of a heist, I’d kiss you.”

“Come on,” she said, waving him forward with her. “You pick one out, too. I want everyone to know the bandit has an accomplice.”

A few minutes later, both she and Carter had their gnomes tucked under their arms and were creeping back into the shadows. They were nearly to safety, when Aunt Louise’s porch light flicked on.

“I see you,” her aunt’s shrill voice screeched into the night. “I see you mister! And I’ve already called the police.”

“Shit,” Carter cursed, breaking into a run beside Lula.

“Don’t worry, she didn’t see us. She’s half blind,” Lula said, sprinting for the sleigh. “We just need to get out of here before the police arrive. I don’t think she’d press charges once she knew it was me, but Aunt Louise hasn’t been all the way on her rocker the past few years.”

“Getting arrested wasn’t on my Christmas wish list,” Carter said, handing her his gnome as he untied the reindeer. “But I guess as long as we get booked together it could be fun.”

Lula giggled as he jumped up beside her and set the reindeer into motion, turning left into the alley behind the abandoned Blue Plate Cafe as a siren sounded in the distance. “I can’t even imagine,” she said. “My parents would kill me.”

“You’re twenty-two years old, babe,” Carter said. “You don’t have to be afraid of your parents anymore.”

“I’m not afraid of them,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder as Carter took another left onto Rook Street. “Just respectful of the guilt-inducing power they wield.”

Carter sighed. “I guess that means you’re not changing your mind about closing down the shop and coming with me when I leave town this spring.”

Lula shot him a hard look, her pulse picking up. “You’re still going?”

“I’m still going,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road, guiding the reindeer back onto the Old Town Highway as a police car streaked by in the other direction. “My work here is almost finished. I want you to come with me more than anything Lu, but if you can’t, I’m still going. I have to.”

“But I thought…” she started. “What about—” She broke off, her throat tightening.

“What about what, babe?” Carter asked, sounding as miserable as she felt.

“What about the ring? My aunt said you bought an engagement ring a few days ago.” Lula pressed her lips together, fighting the urge to cry. “I thought that meant you’d changed your mind.”

He cursed softly, “I should have known better than to think she’d keep that a secret. Your Aunt Cathy is a busybody, you know that?”

“I’m sorry,” Lula said in a soft voice. “She didn’t mean anything by it. She was just excited for me, for us.”

“Don’t apologize. It’s not your fault.” Carter pulled to a stop on the side of the road and turned to her, slipping a small box from his coat pocket and opening it to reveal a perfect little princess cut ring.

“I had a more romantic setting in mind,” he said with a nervous laugh. “But a proposal after a gnome theft is still pretty memorable.”

Lula sniffed, wishing she could get swept up in the moment. But if Carter was still leaving, if he refused to understand that she couldn’t abandon her shop and the town she loved to roam the earth, searching for treasure that might never be found…

“I love you, Tallulah Josephine,” Carter continued. “And I want you to be my partner in every adventure. Will you take this ring and run away with me?”

A sob rose in her throat. “Why can’t you stay?”

“I can’t make the kind of living I want to make here, Lu,” he said, his dark eyes pleading with her to understand. “I don’t want you to have to work all the time. I want to make enough money to give you everything you’ve ever wanted, and the only way I know how to do that is to keep doing what I’ve been doing until a job pays off the way it did for my dad.”

“But all I want is you,” Lula said. “I don’t mind working a lot. I like to stay busy. I’d go crazy sitting around the house, doing nothing all day.”

“And I’ll go crazy if I stay here and never find out what’s waiting for me out there,” Carter said before continuing on in an urgent whisper. “Please say yes, L.J. Come treasure hunting with me. It’s such a rush. I promise you’ll love it.”

“The rush. That’s all you care about.” Lula shook her head, dodging Carter’s hand when he reached for her arm, and jumping out of the sleigh. “Don’t touch me. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to think I was enough for you.”

“Lula, please, don’t go,” he called out. “Come back!”

But Lula was already halfway down the street. She ran until she reached the front gate of Tea for Two and rushed through her small front garden, letting herself into the dark shop and locking the door behind her. Upstairs in her apartment, she threw herself on her bed and cried until her eyes felt like they were turning inside out, waiting for Carter’s voice to sound from below her bedroom window. But he never came, and eventually Lula fell into a restless, miserable sleep.

The next morning, she woke to the sound of the phone ringing. It was her mother, telling her that Aunt Louise had suffered a heart attack on her porch the night before. She’d passed away en route to the hospital. Apparently, catching the Gnome Thief in the act had been too much for the old woman’s heart.

Sick with guilt, Lula hung up and called Carter, needing to share the terrible news with him, no matter how angry or hurt she was. But Carter didn’t answer the phone, and when she drove to his apartment near the highway, his roommates said he’d packed his things and blown out of town, leaving no forwarding address.

By the time Lula took her seat at Aunt Louise’s funeral a few days later, she’d given up hope of seeing Carter again. He’d abandoned her, taking all the enchantment with him and leaving her to shoulder the shame and guilt of killing her poor aunt all on her own.

As she watched Louise’s casket being lowered into the cold ground, Lula made a solemn vow. From that moment on, her wild side was a thing of the past. There was no room in her life for magic or whimsy or handsome men who made her believe in forever, only to disappear without a trace. She was done with that nonsense.

The foolish, flighty, naïve part of her was going into the grave with her great aunt, and it would
never
be seen or heard from again.

CHAPTER ONE

Present Day

Lula

It was the holiday season again in Lonesome Point, and the sunny world outside Lula’s window sparkled in the cool winter air. Garlands of bright red and green hung across Main Street, The Blue Saloon Hotel was decked out in giant wreaths and bright red bunting that made the old building look like it was smiling, and people were already setting up chairs in the square to watch the Lonesome Point Elementary School Christmas Pageant, due to start in an hour.

Mothers and fathers cuddled their toddlers, bundled up against the unusually cold day. Older folks cupped mittened hands around their coffees, and young couples stole kisses under the mistletoe when they thought no one was looking. The scene begged Lula to break out into “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.” Instead, she drew her curtains with a
shwoop
and returned to icing the cookies on her kitchen counter with a scowl.

Christmas. Bah. Humbug.

If she were a less driven business owner, she would close down Tea for Two from December twenty-first to January second and disappear to an isolated island in the Pacific, where nothing would remind her of her least favorite time of year. But Lula wasn’t the sort who tucked tail and ran. She was the kind of woman who kept her chin up, her upper lip stiff, and soldiered through the misery of the holidays without flinching. She planned a cookie exchange that grew larger and more involved every year and threw herself into preparations for the annual gathering with the enthusiasm of a holiday-a-holic.

No one in Lonesome Point realized that she loathed every minute of icing cookies and decorating the three Christmas trees that graced the corners of Tea for Two, and that’s the way it was going to stay. Lula’s misery was private, like the rest of her emotions. Let her flighty younger cousin, Mia, run around, spreading holiday cheer, and crying every time she heard a choir sing “Oh Holy Night.
”

After applying the finishing touches to her sugar cookies, Lula placed the treats neatly into twenty-five identical holiday tins, washed her hands, and dressed in her dark green drop waist dress and black tights. She took a moment to spray a few flyaway hairs back into the chignon at the nape of her neck, brushed on the mascara she wore only on special occasions, and picked up her tube of First Blush lipstick, only to put it immediately back down again.

There was no point in putting on lipstick, only to spend time scrubbing it off of her best china later. She’d waste enough time cleaning up the rest of the ladies’ lipstick smudges after they left. Besides, no one noticed the way Lula looked. She faded into the background like the antique rose wallpaper downstairs, adding to the complete picture of Tea for Two, but taken for granted as a piece of the whole.

She’d only recently celebrated her thirty-third birthday—with a snifter of brandy and a small splurge on crafting supplies. But Lula had been a fixture downtown for thirteen years. People were so used to seeing her puttering in her garden or bustling around in her shop that they took her for granted. She had been the spinster who served tea and made dolls long before her thirtieth birthday, and to the town of Lonesome Point, that’s who she would be until the day she died.

And that was just fine. Lula had stopped longing for a young woman’s life or dreaming a young woman’s dreams years ago. She was content with being overlooked, and rarely felt rancor about being branded a workaholic with a creepy doll fetish.

It was only at Christmas that resentment rose inside of her. It was only when sleigh bells rang and carolers sang that discontent whispered inside her heart, telling her it wasn’t too late to make a change.

“Hmph,” she grunted softly as she stepped into her sensible black boots, ignoring the heeled Mary Janes she’d bought a few days ago, when she’d been browsing in the shoe store and listening to the voice of temptation.

She didn’t
really
want to change; she wanted her simple, steady life, and as soon as the holiday nonsense was over, everything would be back to normal. She could stop sulking over her morning coffee, stop staring out the window at the bright winter days with a weight on her chest, and stop waking in the night with tears on her cheeks and the memory of one man’s kiss on her lips. She would forget all the pain and longing for another year, and the world would keep on turning, one day weaving its way into the next in the tightly knit, sensible tapestry of her life.

With a final glance around her apartment, making sure the stove and lights were off, and the miniature Christmas tree was twinkling in the living room window, assuring passersby that no Scrooges were in residence here, she started downstairs to finish her last minute preparations for the party.

By the time the guests began to arrive, Lula had cider warming in the Crock-Pot, carafes of hot chocolate and coffee on every table, old-time Christmas music piping through Tea for Two’s speakers, and a smile fixed on her face. No one would ever guess that she secretly loathed this event with a passion she usually reserved for people who let their dogs poo on the sidewalk.

“Lula, so good to see you!” Her cousin Mia set down her overflowing duffle bag and pulled Lula into a hug.

Lula went stiffly, embracing her shorter cousin efficiently, trying not to cringe at the feel of Mia’s softly rounded stomach pressing against hers.

Of course, Mia
would
get pregnant within a few months of getting married to a man she’d met barely six months ago before she had any idea if this romance was going to last. Her cousin had more enthusiasm than sense, but Lula didn’t try to reason with Mia anymore. Some people were a lost cause, and all you could do was include them in your prayers before you went to sleep.

“Merry Christmas, and thank you again for hosting the exchange,” Mia said, brown eyes shining as she took off her coat and hung it on the coat tree. “I look forward to it every year, but especially this year. My sweet tooth is as out of control as my hormones.” She broke off with a wide grin and waved at someone over Lula’s shoulder. “Betty! How are you, sugar?”