Snowbound Christmas Cheer Read online

  Snowbound Christmas Cheer

  Snowbound Series Book Thirteen

  By

  Veronica Tower

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Snowbound Christmas Cheer by Veronica Tower

  Red Rose™ Publishing

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  Red Rose™ Publishing

  Copyright© 2012 Veronica Tower

  ISBN: 978-1-4543-0239-1

  Cover Artist: Shirley Burnett

  Content Editor: Zena Gainer

  Line Editor: Bernadette Smith

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  This is a work of fiction. All references to real places, people, or events are coincidental, and if not coincidental, are used fictitiously. All trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, and registered service marks are the property of their respective owners and are used herein for identification purposes only.

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  Snowbound Christmas Cheer

  By

  Veronica Tower

  Chapter One

  Jo Taylor pulled into the Kroger parking lot, staring hard past the swishing window wipers into the swirl of snowflakes whipping past her windshield. It was two days before Christmas and forecasters were excitedly predicting at least eight inches of snow tonight—the second big storm of the year and it was still December. A white Christmas was all but assured.

  The lot was swamped with people getting last minute supplies—food, drinks and salt for their driveways and sidewalks. You would think that this close to Lake Michigan they would be used to hard winters and prepare for them in advance, but nobody ever seemed to do that. It didn’t help matters that Christmas was only a day and a half away and that many of these people were also thinking about those last minute items they would need for their holiday meals.

  Jo was sort of doing that herself.

  She found a spot to park her car in, turned off the engine and got out into the snow. Technically she assumed she should call it a snow storm but Jo liked the falling flakes, and she was glad to have the excuse to get out in it even if walking would have been better than driving. Snow was clean, cold and fun. She loved the feel of the flakes hitting her cheeks and melting on her tongue. She loved to get out and play in it and dreamed of the day she could do so with her own husband and her own kids—building snowmen, having snowball fights, making snow angels, going sledding…but she really hadn’t had a lot of luck with guys in her twenty-six years so that dream was going to have to wait a while.

  Last Halloween she thought her ill fortune might be turning around when she met a cool white guy named A.J. at a party in a bar, but A.J.’s friend in the bad toga costume had gotten violently ill and thrown up all over Jo and that had sort of prematurely terminated the night.

  A.J. hadn’t called her again so she assumed that she had been having a lot more fun than he had at the party.

  Not that he really mattered. Jo was only twenty-six—a fairly attractive African-American woman with good skin and moderately large breasts. She would find someone else eventually. There were plenty of other men out there and some of them had to be even more handsome than the dashing, ripped college senior with the beautiful blue eyes beneath the crown of hair he’d dyed jet black for his Elvis costume.

  She sighed and wondered just how exactly she was supposed to meet another man to make her dreams come true. It wasn’t easy. She’d been so excited about the Halloween party, specifically because her friend Thea had been certain that she and her boyfriend could set Jo up with a good guy—but Thea had been wrong. A.J. didn’t turn out to be a winner after all.

  Jo walked through the falling snow toward the entrance to the grocery store. The flakes fell fast and thick around her, already accumulating an inch deep on the parking lot. She probably shouldn’t have driven out this afternoon. She didn’t have any critical shortages in her apartment, but when she’d noticed she was out of eggnog, her favorite holiday drink, she’d decided it was okay to slip out and pick up another quart. While she was at it, she might pick up half a gallon of eggnog ice cream too. Turkey Hill had a flavor to die for and a lot of the time the brand was on sale.

  She hurried on through the parking lot, keeping an eye out for half-blind drivers or otherwise dangerous vehicles. When she reached the sidewalk in front of the store, she dug a dollar out of her purse for the Salvation Army before slipping into the warmth of the building.

  She paused to brush the snow off her ski jacket and looked around. People were everywhere and the shelves were beginning to look empty.

  Damn!

  Jo grabbed up a rectangular carrying basket and began weaving her way through the crowd. She found a seasonal tin of the thin white cookies with the sugar coating and stuck it in her basket with a guilty look to either side. As an oral hygienist she knew the dangers of sugar but it was also one of her biggest vices. And what was the use of a holiday like Christmas if you couldn’t let down your hair a little and indulge your vices?

  As she made her way to the dairy section, she added large bags of M&Ms and Hershey kisses to her basket. She passed on the little box of mints but snagged the little container of brightly colored hard candy. Then forced herself to hurry on out of the aisle, past the meat and into the dairy section.

  The eggnog was almost all gone!

  Darting forward, Jo snatched up the very last half-gallon container—or at least she tried to. The container didn’t find its way into her basket because some white guy had grabbed it at exactly the same time as she had. There was no way she was going to let him have it!

  “Excuse me,” she said, keeping her voice prim, proper and completely uncompromising. “This is my bottle of eggnog.”

  “How do you figure—Jo?”

  For the first time, Jo looked up from the place where their hands were almost touching on the carton of eggnog to look at the man’s face. He was handsome with blond hair and blue eyes and she was certain she’d never seen him before in her life.

  “Jo? It’s A.J.,” the man said. “You remember? I was dressed as Elvis. We met at The Church Key on Halloween. Remember?”

  “A.J.?” Jo repeated. The transformation in the man was astounding! Halloween night he’d had jet black hair and while she’d known he had to have dyed it—brunettes do not have blue eyes—she couldn’t believe how different he looked. She’d thought he’d been handsome before, but now?

  Suddenly Jo remembered she was mad at A.J. Why hadn’t the bastard called her? She thought they’d been having a good time, but why the hell had he ignored her for two damn months?

  She tugged on the eggnog bottle, trying to take it away from him. “What the hell happened to you? I thought you were a nice guy. You took my number but you never used it!”

  A look of apparently genuine surprise flashed across A.J.’s face. “You mean you wanted me to call you?”

  It was moments like this that Jo wondered why she even tried to find a guy to date. “That’s why I gave it to you, remember?”
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  “Yeah, I know,” A.J. said, “but that was before my asshole roommate, Brad, threw up all over you! I mean, it was pretty horrible! And you were really upset! You wouldn’t let me drive you home or anything!”

  “Because he threw up all over me!” Jo reminded him. “Did you really want to be around me with vomit all over my jersey?” Jo had gone to the costume party as a football player—the most petit and sexy little football player in the state of Michigan, she’d been willing to believe. At least, that was the way she’d felt when A.J. was talking to her. When he hadn’t called her the next day, she’d felt like a Grade A loser.

  “I’d have taken you home,” A.J. said. “Hell it was my idiot friend who did it to you.”

  She thought for a moment that he was going to say something else, but he evidently thought better of it.

  She gave a gentle pull on the eggnog carton again, but A.J. still wouldn’t let it go. He wasn’t looking at the carton. He was looking at her. But there was absolutely no give in the grip that secured the container between them.

  “And you couldn’t call why?”

  A.J. sighed. “Because I didn’t think you’d want to see me again after that. The evening had been going so great, but after Brad did his thing I figured every time you’d see me or hear my voice you’d start smelling that vomit again.”

  Suddenly Jo could do just that. The acrid memory burned through her senses, but all she had been worried about at the time was how disgusting she must look and smell and how horrible it would be if she got any of the vomit on A.J.’s white Elvis duds.

  “I wish you’d called,” she told him.

  “Really?”

  His surprise hurt her. It felt as if he hadn’t thought about her enough to really consider how she’d felt about their night. “Yeah, really.” She sighed and remembered the storm outside. It was time to go. “Now can I have my eggnog, please?”

  A.J. let it go. “Sure.”

  The moment he released it, Jo turned to go mouthing polite platitudes over her shoulder. “It was nice to run into you again.”

  A.J. didn’t answer her, confirming Jo’s impression that the vomit really had ruined everything. She started toward the ice cream aisle.

  Her cell phone rang.

  Why on earth was it that phones always rang when you were busy or it was awkward to get to them? She stuck her purse in her basket next to the eggnog and dug out the phone. “Hello?”

  “Is it too late to call?” A.J. asked.

  Jo was so surprised she stopped walking and the woman behind her bumped her with her cart.

  “Hey, watch it!” Jo snapped, even though she knew she was at least partially at fault.

  The woman glared at her and moved around her—so much for Christmas spirit in the grocery store.

  “Too late to call for what?” Jo asked him.

  “For our second date,” A.J. said. “Seeing as you aren’t actually mad at me for Brad wrecking Halloween, I was wondering if you’d still be interested in going out again.”

  A thrill of pleasure rushed through Jo’s body. Talk about an unexpected Christmas present. She’d really liked A.J. Sure he was a couple of years younger—twenty-one or twenty-two as opposed to her twenty-six—but he was a really handsome guy who’d been able to make her laugh. Still, the rules of dating say you should never make yourself look to eager. “Maybe I’m mad at you for waiting two months to call me.”

  “I should have sent you flowers,” A.J. agreed. “I’m sure I could have gotten your work address out of Nick. But the pathetic truth is that I listened to a bunch of guys who aren’t dating anybody and let them convince me you were out of my league.”

  “Out of your league?” Jo repeated. She felt just a little stunned by the suggestion. A.J. was a college student studying marketing. He was handsome and smart. Why on earth would he think she was out of his league?

  “Well, yeah, you know how beautiful you are. Add to that that you’re a couple of years older and I’m still in school and everyone kept asking why you’d want to involve yourself with someone like me again. I mean, one night at a party is one thing, but dating? It’s intimidating.”

  “I’m intimidating?” Jo couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  When A.J. answered her she could hear his voice both naturally in her ears and through the phone. “You do realize how beautiful you are, don’t you?”

  She turned and found him standing right next to her, blue eyes open wide with sincerity.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t send you those flowers. We had a great time together at the party and I should have trusted that. Is it too late to try again?”

  A.J. thought he was dating up? She’d been worried all of this time that he was out of her league. Jo felt so flustered she could barely form her thoughts into a coherent sentence. “You mean go out on a date?”

  A.J. turned his phone off and stuck it in his pocket. “That’s precisely what I mean.”

  Jo lowered her phone. “I...that would be nice. Are you thinking after Christmas or after New Years?”

  A.J. took a small step closer to her—small because he was already standing very close. “Actually, I was thinking more like right now. I’m supposed to fly to Peoria in the morning, and while I think there’s a good chance the flight will be canceled, I don’t want to take a chance and have to wait until I come back to school to see you again.”

  Everything was moving too fast for Jo to keep up with. “Now? It’s snowing! Everything is going to be closing.”

  “I just want some time to get to know you better without all the noise and the bustle of a big party going on around us,” A.J. told her.

  “And without Brad,” Jo added with a little teasing smile.

  “Definitely without Brad!” A.J. agreed. “So what do you say?”

  This seemed impossible to Jo. How did they move in ten minutes from A.J. not calling her to trying to figure out how to go out together right this moment? “Where would we go?”

  “Well, we could start by going to my car,” A.J. said. “I picked up some Hennessy on my way to Kroger. We’ll grab some cups, drink some eggnog, and talk a while.”

  To Jo’s surprise that sounded really sweet to her—no pressure, just a little quiet conversation. But another of those rules of dating is that the woman is never supposed to drop everything to go out with the guy. He’s supposed to plan ahead. And while the rules didn’t say anything in particular about dates that didn’t involve actually going someplace like a movie or a restaurant, she was pretty sure that drinking in a car violated the spirit of the rules.

  “It’s snowing,” she reminded him. Her heart wasn’t into the protest, but she said it just the same.

  “It just started an hour ago. Give me an hour more—one drink and time to get it out of our systems so it’s okay to drive.”

  Jo wondered why she was trying to find reasons not to do something she really wanted to. “Okay, let’s give it a try.”

  Chapter Two

  They stopped to pick up cups and ice cream, then got in the express lane and waited through the line. As they stepped outside again, Jo felt like she was in that old Dan Fogelberg song. It was snowing out; they were leaving the grocery store; and planning to drink in A.J.’s car. The only real difference was that A.J. and she had only met a couple of months ago. This wasn’t the epilogue to an old love affair. It was the possible prologue to a new relationship.

  The snow had gotten deeper while she’d talked to A.J. and finished her shopping. It was at least two inches thick under foot, which really would have worried her if she wasn’t so excited about meeting A.J. again. His car was an old gray-green Capris Classic—large and comfortable. He unlocked and opened the passenger door for her, then put their groceries into the back seat. He paused to rummage quickly through the bags to find the eggnog and the cups and handed them to Jo after she sat down. Then he closed the doors on that side of the car and got in the driver’s side.

  The bottle of Hennessy lay in it
s bag on the seat beside them. A.J. quickly opened the brandy so that the strong smell filled the car. “Give me a couple of those cups there,” he suggested.

  Jo pulled out the red Solo plastic cups, opened them, and put them in the drink holders. “I hope you don’t think you have to fill these.”

  A.J. laughed and put half an inch of brandy in the bottom of each cup. Then he capped the liquor and opened the eggnog, putting perhaps three more inches of liquid on top of the brandy.

  He closed the carton, set it carefully on the floor of the backseat, and offered one of the cups to Jo. “To serendipity. I’m really glad I ran into you at the grocery store today.”

  “Me too,” Jo said as she touched her cup to his.

  She loved eggnog, but she’d never actually had it with brandy in it before. The eggnog was sweet, but the brandy…well, she didn’t know quite what to make of it. Come to think of it, it wasn’t just that she hadn’t had it in eggnog. This was the first time she’d tasted it at all.

  “Ahhhh,” A.J. sighed with satisfaction. “There’s nothing quite like eggnog. Now I know it’s Christmas.”

  He tried and failed to find a more comfortable position behind the wheel that still let him turn halfway toward her. Frustrated he reached into his pocket for his keys. “Give me a moment. This isn’t quite working for me.”

  He put his drink in the cup holder and started the engine. This let him adjust the seat electronically, giving him a lot more room behind the wheel.

  “How about you?” he asked.

  Jo was a lot smaller than A.J. and already felt pretty comfortable, but she reached down beside her anyway and fiddled with the levers until her seat was back in the same position as him.

  A.J. hit the windshield wipers and watched them struggled to clean the glass in front of them. It took about six sweeps but the snow was still fluffy enough to be moved and they were able to see out to the darkening sky. He hit another switch so that the heat came up on low. He left the engine running.