The Corner of Holly and Ivy--A feel-good Christmas romance Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Debbie Mazzuca

  Excerpt from It Happened at Christmas © 2014 by Debbie Mazzuca

  Cover illustration and design by Elizabeth Turner Stokes. Photograph of sled by John Block/Getty Images. Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Forever

  Hachette Book Group

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  First Edition: October 2018

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  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-4424-6 (mass market); 978-1-5387-4423-9 (ebook)

  E3-20180912-DANF

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Discover More Debbie Mason

  About the Author

  Also by Debbie Mason

  Praise for Debbie Mason’s Harmony Harbor Series

  Fall in Love with Forever Romance

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Bella, our beloved Yorkie, who gave us seventeen years of love, laughter, and kisses.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to my editor, Alex Logan, who goes above and beyond for me and my books and never fails to make them better. To Beth deGuzman, Amy Pierpont, Leah Hultenschmidt, Lexi Smail, Gabrielle Kelly, Jodi Rosoff, Estelle Hallick, Monisha Lakhotia, Tareth Mitch, Penina Lopez, Elizabeth Turner Stokes, and the sales department at Grand Central/Forever, thanks so very much for all your hard work on behalf of my books.

  My heartfelt thanks to Pamela Harty for always being there for me. Thanks also to the members of Pamela’s team at The Knight Agency, Deirdre Knight, Eileen Spencer, and Jamie Pritchett.

  To my husband, children, and grandchildren for always supporting and encouraging me to follow my dreams, thank you. I love you all more than you’ll ever know. Additional thanks to my daughter Jess for not only reading my first drafts and letting me talk endlessly about my stories, but also for agreeing to head up Team Mason. Thanks, honey.

  And last but not least, I’m so very grateful for all the readers, reviewers, and bloggers who spend time with me in Harmony Harbor (and Christmas, Colorado) and on social media. Thank you for your kindness in sharing my stories with your friends and family and followers and for your continued support.

  An extra special thanks to these awesome readers who named Comet, Cathy Burke, Missy Johnston Townes, Tiffany King Hall, and her daughter Keiley Hall. Additional thanks to Mary Mannella for not being mad at me for misspelling her name in Sandpiper Shore’s dedication. Thanks again, Mary!

  Chapter One

  At the sound of a drawer slamming outside her closed bedroom door, Arianna Bell awoke with a start. She blinked, trying to get her bearings. Was it morning or night? The blackout curtains in her bedroom made it difficult to tell. Down the hall, someone continued their frenetic opening and closing of drawers, and she sat up in bed.

  Burglar or her grandmother? she wondered, not in the least alarmed either way. After barely surviving the fire that destroyed her business and three others, Arianna wasn’t fazed by much these days. Besides, it wasn’t like they had anything of real value in the small Cape Cod home where she now lived with her grandmother, Helen Fairchild.

  Another drawer slammed. “Where did you put the damn car keys? I have to hit the campaign trail.”

  Arianna’s stomach muscles bunched in response to her grandmother’s angry question, making a lie of her claim that nothing fazed her anymore. At that moment she moved beyond slightly fazed to really worried.

  And not because her grandmother was hitting the campaign trail. At eighty, Helen was the oldest woman to run for mayor of Harmony Harbor, a small town less than an hour from Boston. Her grandmother’s habit of misplacing things was nothing new either. But over the past few weeks, Helen’s forgetfulness hadn’t been so easily explained away.

  As much as Arianna would like to blame moments such as this on the stress of the mayoral race or the typical forgetfulness of old age, she couldn’t. Her grandmother had given up driving a decade before and had sold her BMW around the same time. Arianna had lost her car in the fire. It had been parked in the alley between Tie the Knot and the beauty salon that had burned down.

  Cradling her injured arm to her chest, Arianna scooted off the bed. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d gotten out of bed of her own volition in the past seven weeks. Which the piles of books, water glasses, and teacups on the floor by her bed attested to. One benefit of spending so much time in the dark was that she seemed to have developed bat-like sonar and safely made it through the obstacle course and to the other side of her bedroom without knocking something over or falling on her face. She reached for the doorknob with her good hand.

  “Arianna, where”—the door flew open, shoving Arianna and her elbow into the wall at her back—“the hell are the keys to my Beemer?”

  So much for my bat-like sonar, she thought, trying to breathe through the pain. It felt like someone had whacked the elbow of her damaged arm with a tuning fork, the ache vibrating up and down her forearm and hand. Which might have been a good thing—not the pain in her arm obviously, but her inability to speak. She had no idea how to deal with this. She didn’t know whether she should tell her grandmother the truth or protect her with a lie.

  “Where is that child?” her grandmother muttered, her voice raspy from years of smoking.

  “Standing behind the door, Glamma,” Arianna said through clenched teeth.

  Her grandmother had coined the moniker Glamma years before it had become popular. Not a surprise since Helen had been forty for as long as Arianna could remembe
r. She was all about fashion and glamour. Once a highly-sought-after runway model in Paris, she’d returned to Harmony Harbor to raise her daughter (Arianna’s mother, Beverly) and open Tie the Knot, a bridal shop on Main Street. The shop she’d passed down to Arianna a decade before. The same shop the madman had burned to the ground in July.

  “Don’t go there,” Arianna told herself firmly. She relived that night over and over again in her dreams and refused to relive it when she was wide-awake.

  “Don’t go where?” her grandmother asked, clapping her hands.

  Arianna came out from behind the door. “Nowhere. You can stop clapping, Glamma. The lightbulbs are burned out. I have to replace them.”

  Arianna had a thing for Clap On! Clap Off! lights. Her baby sister, Jenna, knew about her secret addiction and had replaced the lights in Arianna’s bedroom with Clappers the day she’d come to live with her grandmother. Jenna was the sweet, thoughtful sister. Much sweeter than Arianna deserved after the way she’d treated her growing up.

  Glamma’s lips thinned. Her silver-blond hair was pulled back from her face, giving her an instant face-lift and showcasing her pale-blue eyes and exquisite bone structure. “You mean I will. You haven’t been out of the house since the day you got home from the hospital,” she said as she walked to the window on the other side of the bedroom.

  Arianna was so relieved her grandmother remembered exactly when she’d last ventured outside that her sarcastic tone didn’t get under her skin. Besides, half of what came out of her grandmother’s mouth had bite. She’d always had a dry sense of humor, something she’d passed on to Arianna. Although Arianna’s sense of humor had been missing for quite some time.

  The blackout curtains rattled along the rod as her grandmother whipped them open with strength and purpose. Just like her walk, Arianna thought with a smile. She must have been imagining things. There was nothing wrong with her grandmother, nothing wrong at all. Arianna felt like sinking to the area rug in relief. She might have if the bright autumn sunshine pouring through the window weren’t half-blinding her.

  Squinting, she turned away from the sun’s rays. Big mistake. The position put her in direct view of the mirror on her dresser. There was a time not so long ago when catching a glimpse of her shoulder-length blond hair, blue eyes, and thin frame in the mirror wouldn’t have bothered her. It did now.

  “All right, I’m off to…” Helen frowned and then rubbed her forehead as though she’d forgotten what she’d been about to say, or maybe where she’d been about to go.

  That wasn’t unusual though. People complained about forgetting why they walked into a room all the time. You couldn’t go a day on social media without a meme about it popping up. Women in their menopausal and post-menopausal years posted them all the time. No doubt if Glamma were on social media, she would too.

  Helen lowered her fingers from her forehead and bent to pick up a copy of the town’s local newspaper, the Harmony Harbor Gazette, from the floor.

  Arianna was impressed and checked off another box in the “Glamma’s fine” column. She wasn’t nearly as flexible as her grandmother.

  Helen’s face cleared. “Campaigning, that’s it. I have to get out there and pound the pavement. I’ll see you later, darling. I won’t be back until late. Don’t forget to eat.”

  Arianna took in her grandmother’s attire as she passed her on the way out the door. Just as she suspected, they were pajamas. Pink satin pajamas. “Wait. You don’t mean you’re leaving right this very minute, do you?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. I have to get a leg up on the Gallagher boy.”

  This wasn’t good. Not good at all. Arianna’s heart began to gallop. She could barely look after herself. How was she supposed to look after her grandmother? “Why don’t we both get dressed and go together? It’s about time I got out there on the campaign trail with you, don’t you think?” Arianna said, working to keep the panic from her voice.

  Her grandmother blinked at Arianna’s suggestion and then blinked again like a sleepy owl. Arianna wasn’t sure whether it was because Helen didn’t recognize her or because she was stunned by her offer to accompany her.

  “You want to come on the stump with me?”

  Thank goodness it was the latter. Wait a minute. What had she been thinking? She’d just agreed to leave the house! “Yes. Unless you think it’s going to rain and we both should stay home.” She looked out the window, hoping to see water-logged black clouds darkening the cerulean sky.

  Her grandmother’s lips flattened. “I knew you’d back out.”

  “I’m not backing out. I’ll bring an umbrella just in case.”

  “We don’t need an umbrella. We’ll take my car.”

  Arianna bowed her head and then lifted it to look at her grandmother. “Glamma, you—”

  Helen interrupted her with a snap of her fingers. “I don’t know what came over me. I haven’t had that car in years.”

  She didn’t know whether her grandmother truly remembered or had picked up on Arianna’s distress. Memory issues aside, Helen Fairchild was one sharp cookie.

  Arianna gave her grandmother a reassuring smile. “We all forget things now and again. No big deal, right?”

  “Right. Right,” she said in a voice that didn’t sound nearly as confident as Arianna’s.

  An hour later, her heart pounding like she’d run a one-minute mile, Arianna stepped out of the house on the corner of Holly and Ivy. Positive she was about to faint, she turned back to the door, fumbling for the knob with her good hand.

  Obviously, she hadn’t learned from her past mistakes. She knew better than to allow strong emotions to influence her decisions. That was the one benefit that had come out of the fire on Main Street. Arianna no longer had feelings or acted upon them. She’d been an apathetic shell holed up in her room for the past seven weeks. Now look at her, venturing outside when she’d be perfectly content never to set foot out of the house again. A fact she couldn’t share with her closest friends and family because they had no problem sharing with her that they thought she needed professional help.

  In the middle of the night when she woke up beneath sweat-soaked sheets and gasping for air, she agreed with them. But then morning would arrive and push back the shadows that haunted her, and she’d come to her senses. Nothing a therapist could say or do would help her recover from the Nightmare on Main Street.

  Her grandmother called out to her from where she stood smoking, leaning against a white picket fence draped in ruby-red vines. “Come on, now. The primary is next week, and the Gazette says the Gallagher boy is in the lead. We don’t have a moment to lose.”

  If her grandmother had been running a strong second, it would have been okay. Next Tuesday’s primary election narrowed the field to two candidates from the seven currently in the race. However, according to the Gazette’s latest poll, that was not the case. Helen Fairchild was running dead last in the mayoral race.

  Arianna reluctantly released the doorknob. Her eighty-year-old grandmother had a dream. She wanted to be mayor to protect her beloved hometown from the vision Daniel Gallagher had for Harmony Harbor’s future.

  Arianna knew a little something about dreams herself. Before the Nightmare on Main Street, she’d lived and breathed her dream of becoming the next Vera Wang and of Tie the Knot becoming the next Kleinfeld Bridal. As a thirty-six-year-old (admittedly bitter) divorcée, it seemed her entire grown-up life had revolved around ensuring every bride had the wedding dress of her dream.

  She’d spent twelve hours a day, seven days a week, working with customers who could turn into a bridezilla or a weepy mess in the blink of an eye. But the most difficult for her to deal with had been the sweet, wide-eyed innocents who thought their lives would be perfect the moment they said I do.

  She’d survived the daily drama and stress without sarcastic rejoinders and eyes rolls because of what awaited her at the end of her day. The moment she retired to the room above her shop on Main Street, everything el
se faded away. It was the place where the magic happened.

  Sometimes she’d be holed up there from dusk to dawn hand sewing lace, crystals, and pearls onto the tulle and organza gowns, turning them into one-of-a-kind works of art. And while the hours were long and the work sometimes tedious and backbreaking, she’d never once complained. After all, she’d been following her passion, living her dream.

  Her dreams were over now. Everything had gone up in smoke. But it was more than guilt at the loss of her grandmother’s legacy and worry about her that forced Arianna out of the house today. It was her deep and abiding love for the woman who was at that moment regarding her through narrowed eyes and a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  “What on earth are you wearing?” asked the woman who only an hour before had planned to knock on doors in pink satin pajamas.

  Arianna looked down at the mocha-colored lounge pants and top she wore beneath a calf-length blush velour cardigan. In deference to her damaged arm, the right sleeve was empty and the top two buttons fastened to conceal the sling she still wore. In deference to Helen, Arianna had swapped the pink sneakers her sister Jenna had paired with the outfit for brown suede ankle boots.

  “It’s the new trend. Loungewear chic,” Arianna informed Helen, who’d obviously recovered from her momentary fashion lapse and looked effortlessly elegant in wide-legged cream pants and a blouse with a bronze-colored sweater draped casually around her shoulders and bronze ballerina slippers on her feet.

  Arianna, who’d once been as style conscious as her grandmother, didn’t care about that sort of thing anymore. Comfortable and cozy pajamas were her wardrobe of choice these days, which her sister knew. Not that Arianna would mention Jenna to Helen. She didn’t blame the Nightmare on Main Street on her sister, but her grandmother did.

  Helen’s brow furrowed, the expression on her face turning from distaste to concern. She approached the step where Arianna stood poised to take flight. She could handle the distaste. The concern…not so much. But she didn’t have time to run back inside. Helen was surprisingly fast for an eighty-year-old. She lifted her walking stick—most people would refer to it as a cane, but not her grandmother—and moved Arianna’s cardigan aside. “You’re too thin.”