“Stay here, Miss Carolyn.”
“Kate…what are you doing?”
Miss Carolyn’s question wasn’t going to stop her. Kate apparently no longer had a job to lose; she no longer had to listen. These people were her family, her community, and she wasn’t going to stand by while some stick-in-the-mud Dallas boy tried to tear them apart and make this world a little bit worse.
With a spine as straight as a flagpole and chin held twice as high, she stormed out of the Miller’s Point Town Hall. Her hammering heart joined the steady rap of her shoes as she jogged down the front steps towards the shadowed figure in the black sport coat.
“Hey!”
He was the only one on the street, hence the only one she possibly could have been talking to, but he didn’t respond to her hail. The flames of frustration and anger licked at the back of her neck, threatening to consume her. She tried to keep them at bay and maintain some semblance of coolness—the last thing she wanted was to be accused of being an emotional or irrational woman by this stranger—but it was next to impossible. When she thought about all the lives this one tiny decision would touch, it burned up every sense of rational control she possessed.
“Hey, Woodward!”
Was it the use of his name, her razor-sharp tone or the whipping wind that caused him to tense up like that? Kate didn’t care as long as he paid attention to her. She closed the small space between them, catching up to him just in front of the Scrooge and Marley office. During the off-season, it served as a general store, but she called it the Money-House all year round. Not even the sight of it, which usually sent a thrill of sentimentality through her, could calm her now. When he didn’t turn to face her, she took the liberty of hopping down off of the curb so she stood directly in his eye line. This forced her to gaze up at him, but she didn’t think there was anything doe-eyed about her. If anything, she felt like an avenging Valkyrie, riding for justice. No one, not even this arrogant stranger, would make the mistake of underestimating her.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
His face remained as composed and disinterested as ever, but Kate spied the fingers of his right fist clenching and unclenching. She almost smiled. He had a tell; something was bothering him.
“I’m looking for my car,” he announced.
“Your car?”
“Yeah, I parked my car here,” he pointed to an empty space in front of Town Hall, “earlier today and now it’s gone. It’s a rental.”
“It got towed, then.”
“Towed?”
“We don’t allow cars in town during the festival. It ruins the illusion.”
Kate almost laughed as she said it, but quelled the urge to do so by crossing her shivering arms over her chest. Everyone with half a brain knew no cars could come into town during the festival. It was on every brochure and article ever written about their little Christmas town; plus, the Martins made a tidy penny renting out their field as a parking lot during the winter. Yet another source of income they’d lose if this guy managed to go through with his plan.
“You should be thanking me, then. I’m modernizing the place already.” His tone managed to be smug even as she wondered if the slight shrink of his shoulders meant he may not entirely believe that. “Who do I call about getting it back?”
What arrogance! She’d come out here to give him a piece of her mind and he had the audacity to ask her about his car?
“I don’t think you’re going anywhere until you give us some answers.”
“With all due respect, I don’t owe you answers.”
“Oh, really?”
“For my years of service focusing on profitable divisions of his business, my uncle left me the company and I’m doing my best to protect his legacy.”
“His legacy? Look around you! This is his legacy!”
She said is when she supposed she should have said was. Though, in Kate’s estimation, a man’s legacy didn’t die with him; it was a living, growing thing that outlasted him and stretched as long as other people cultivated it. Mr. Woodward would only really die if they let this festival die with him. It was yet another reason Kate continued to fight even when this arrogant jerk couldn’t stop staring down the bridge of his nose at her like she was no more than a receipt stuck to the bottom of his shoes.
“This festival isn’t profitable.”
“Maybe not in money, but—”
“What other kind of profit is there?”
Kate opened her mouth and closed it twice, not because she didn’t know the answer to his question, but because she knew it wouldn’t move him. He was a numbers and cents guy. Telling him what the festival lost in funds it more than made up for in revival of the human spirit probably wasn’t going to do anything other than make her out to be some silly, sentimental woman.
Which she was. But she just didn’t want him thinking it.
“No?” he asked. If she were the fighting type, she might have punched that smug, condescending smirk of victory off of his face, but she refrained. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Now, tell me who I call about the car.”
“I could.” Rather than violence, Kate decided to deal in bitingly sweet sarcasm. “But I have to do what’s best for my town, just like you have to do what’s best for your company. And I don’t think it’s good for us to have a lunatic like you out on the road.”
“If I hear you out, will you give me the number?”
She’d meant her quip about him driving around town as a joke, but he responded as though they were finally speaking the same language: the language of transaction. In some ways, Kate had to admire him for that. He was as single-minded in his determination as she was; they shared a sincere faith in the rightness of their
