Peppermint Kiss

  Peppermint Kiss

  by Marian Snowe

  Synopsis:

  Doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance?

  Poinsettia Collins hates Christmas. Tia’s lived with that awful name for her whole life, so it was just her luck that her college girlfriend would cheat on her on Christmas Eve. Twenty years later, when Tia unexpectedly inherits a distant relative’s Christmas tree farm, she thinks fate couldn’t be laughing any harder...

  Then the woman who broke her heart shows up on the farm’s doorstep with a half-frozen kitten and nowhere to go for the holidays.

  Meg Bartlett’s world fell apart when her girlfriend wrongfully accused her of being unfaithful. When she comes home for Christmas after a long time away, Tia is the last person she expects to see, but maybe now she’ll get the chance to set the record straight. That is, if Tia will finally believe her. And if Tia does...how can she possibly ever win Meg back?

  Best-selling author Marian Snowe brings you this sweet Christmas novella of second chances and holiday warmth.

  "Peppermint Kiss"

  © Marian Snowe 2019

  Rose and Star Press

  First Edition

  All rights reserved

  No part of this e-book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Rose and Star Press and Marian Snowe except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews. Please note that piracy of copyrighted materials is illegal and directly harms the author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Individuals depicted in cover images are models and used solely for illustrative purposes. They should not be assimilated as characters in this work.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  About Marian Snowe

  More from Marian Snowe

  More from Marian Snowe and Ruby Grandin

  Chapter One

  Tia

  December eighteenth: a date that would forever live in infamy. Well, mild infamy, anyway; it was the day that Poinsettia Collins almost got killed by a Christmas tree. And people in the small town of Elliot Creek love nothing more than a good yarn for telling around the dinner table or at the local coffee shop.

  The tree in question was a ten-foot blue spruce. It fell into the snow with a whumph, its trunk a measly foot away from Tia and its branches slapping her soundly in the face. The tree was one of the best on her farm, nice and plump, so she went right down under it to keep the limbs from breaking.

  The delightful scent of spruce filled her nose, and it honestly made her want to puke. The needles pricked her face. The branches poked her in every imaginable place. The snow only slightly cushioned her fall, and it was bone-chilling cold.

  “Bah freaking humbug! Christmas can kiss my ass!” Tia shouted.

  Rob Anderson, her nearest neighbor at three miles away, grabbed two handfuls of branches and lugged the tree to the side, off of her.

  “Oh, dear, I should’ve told you to move faster,” he said. Rob was descended from hearty New England stock and wasn’t about to let something silly like being eighty years old keep him from hauling in his own Christmas tree as he had done himself for the last six decades.

  Tia grunted as she climbed to her feet. “It’s not your fault I’m slow,” she muttered. “Okay, let’s get this baby into the cart.” They carried the tree up a short ramp and into the big wooden cart that Tia had attached to the back of her truck. There were already four other trees stacked in the cart, and since they could fit six, there would be one more to collect before heading back to the farmhouse.

  Tia was not in the mood to cut down more trees, but she had a business to run. It was her first holiday season after taking over the farm and she needed to prove to herself that she could make it work. The majority of the people in town depended on this farm for their trees, after all...which was one of the reasons Tia’s parents had been able to strong-arm her into doing this in the first place. Family traditions were not to be trifled with in Elliot Creek.

  “We all sure were happy to hear you were coming in to restart the business,” Rob said, reminding her once again how much was riding on her. “Once Sherman got sick, we all had to go over to Edgely for trees and you know how the folks over there are.”

  Tia chuckled. Rob was being tongue-in-cheek; there were plenty of people around here who really did think residents in the next town over might as well have been from another planet, but he wasn’t one of them.

  “I’m glad to be doing such a community service,” Tia replied sarcastically.

  “I can’t help but notice that you don’t seem particularly excited about the season,” Rob commented. “Not that I blame you, being so busy and all. But you’re in the business, so to speak.”

  “My parents named me Poinsettia,” Tia pointed out with a roll of her eyes. “A lifetime of jokes at best and bullying at worst would sour anyone against a name like that and everything associated with it.”

  It didn’t help that she’d been a pretty shy kid to begin with and having a cheesy holiday-themed name—and being born on Christmas Eve too—put her far too much in the spotlight around Christmas. She was always under pressure to be the jolliest, most festive person in the room. By now she was used to it (and had come up with every conceivable comeback when someone cracked a joke about her name) but it didn’t mean she had to like it.

  “But you’re still here, working the farm?” Rob followed her to the next tree, carrying the chainsaw for her while she searched around the trunk to find the best spot to place the felling cut. Sooner or later this conversation always came up, and Tia was sure she’d have it several hundred more times before Christmas.

  “Sherman left it to me,” said Tia, and she didn’t add “God knows why” like she always wanted to. Sherman had been her great-aunt’s cousin. Technically Tia’s own cousin twice removed? Or something? She’d only ever known the guy as Great-Aunt Sarah’s favorite cousin, and Great-Aunt Sarah practically raised Tia. They visited the Collins tree farm on occasion, sure, but never for a minute had Tia dreamed it would be her responsibility someday.

  Sarah always called Tia the responsible one, and she still lived as the matriarch of the family a few towns over. Tia’s parents, however, were too busy with their own lives in Boston, so when Sherman passed away, his insistence that the farm remain in the family meant that somehow the will ended up with Tia’s name on it.

  “They do say only a Collins can run the Collins Tree Farm the right way,” Rob told her, smiling.

  “I doubt I’m doing my ancestors proud,” Tia replied with a grimace. She took the chainsaw from him. “I never even spent much time here as a kid.”

  “Time will tell.” Rob got a good grip on the standing spruce and Tia revved up the chainsaw. Together they got the tree cut down without any more life-threatening incidents.

  As they were driving back to the farmhouse, Rob asked, “You plan on heading to your parents’ place in the city for Christmas, dear?”

  “Nah.” Tia waved dismissively. “We sell a lot of trees right up until Christmas Eve, and my parents have some big schmoozey party with their work friends. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near there even if I did like Christmas. I’ll just stay here.”

  “You’re going to be alone, then?” Rob asked in
surprise.

  Tia nervously rubbed the steering wheel with her mittens. “Great-Aunt Sarah invited me to her place, of course,” she replied. “But it’s just so...” She tried to think of how to say this without sounding even more like Ebenezer Scrooge. “Busy over there? Hectic. I’m always underfoot.” Sarah’s huge extended family made Tia feel like a porcupine.

  “Well, there are plenty of places you’ll be welcome if you change your mind. My Liz and me always have the kids up but that just means four of us.”

  “Thanks, Rob,” Tia replied with a weak smile. Why couldn’t everyone just leave her alone about this?

  Don’t get your hopes up about that, Tia told herself morosely. You own a friggin’ Christmas tree farm.

  She and Rob got back to the farm’s sale yard and unloaded the trees. Tia made sure to fluff each one of them up so that they’d look appealing. The forecast called for a bit of snow later today, and that would make the trees even more picturesque. As grumpy and conflicted as she felt about her new life as a tree farmer, she had to admit that Collins trees really were the best she’d seen.

  After Rob waved goodbye and drove off to his own house, Tia tidied up the yard and threw down another layer of sand to cut down on the slipperiness. There were always a bunch of kids picking out trees with their parents, and the last thing she needed was anybody falling and hurting themselves.

  Just like the rest of the place, the farmhouse where she now lived was straight out of a winter holiday card. It was set back from the road beyond a wide lawn, and right now the banisters and posts of the wraparound porch were festooned with pine bough garlands. There was a wreath on the red front door and candles in all the windows. Great-Aunt Sarah had insisted: people would be disappointed to come to the Collins farm to buy a tree and see a bleak, dark-windowed house. It was pretty, Tia couldn’t argue with that. But it didn’t give her any of the warm and fuzzy feelings everyone always said that it should.

  She walked up the carefully shoveled brick path to the house’s side door and went inside. It was quiet so she turned on some music (not Christmas carols) and made herself a cup of coffee. Alone at Christmas. That was no big deal. Why did people make such a fuss about it?

  Considering how spectacularly her last relationship failed, she should be grateful there was nobody around to screw the holidays up for. Back in Hartford, where she’d worked as a small business consultant, there were plenty of opportunities to do fun, festive things this time of year...but Tia went out of her way to avoid them. Dani always tried to understand how Tia felt about jingle bells and reindeer, but Tia knew she was secretly resentful.

  That hadn’t been what ended their two-year-long romance, but Dani did cite Tia’s “attitude” as one major reason. Okay, so maybe she could be a little paranoid and slow to trust. But people who threw themselves wholeheartedly into such important things as love were just asking to be hurt. Dani got fed up with Tia’s “walls,” as she put it. She wanted someone who wasn’t shut up tight as an oyster even after two years together.

  Then Tia made the big mistake: in her hurt and surprise and frustration, she hinted that Dani might be having an affair with someone. Even now, stirring mocha creamer into her coffee, Tia winced as she recalled it. Not her finest hour to be sure. That was the final straw that broke their relationship, and she didn’t blame Dani for it. What kind of person just accuses their girlfriend of that, out of the blue?

  Somebody who’d had it happen before, that’s who.

  And here she was again, back in the same town where it all happened, dumped straight into the middle of those memories.

  At goddamn Christmas.

  Chapter Two

  Meg

  Meg Bartlett pounded with a mittened fist on her parents’ door. It was the fifth time she’d done so since she walked up to the house just a few minutes ago, and the squirm of worry in her stomach was growing bigger and bigger by the second.

  Their car was in the driveway. That was their car, right? Whose else could it be? True, Meg hadn’t actually been to visit her parents in...a couple of years? Had it been that long? Yeah, it had, she reminded herself guiltily. That’s why she was here right now.

  But that aside, there was a car in the driveway, and when Meg cupped her hands around her eyes and peered into the dirty garage window, there was a car in there, too.

  So they had to be home.

  She worried her lip with her teeth. She’d come all this way to surprise them for Christmas, and this was not playing out like the joyful reunion she’d dreamed of. In her imagination, there had been cocoa and matching Christmas sweaters and her parents had greeted her at the door with hugs and then they’d all gone inside and sung carols by the fireplace.

  Given that her parents didn’t even have a fireplace, it was a pretty unrealistic dream to begin with. Not to mention that they were the least likely people possible to welcome her with hugs. But that was beside the point now.

  The avalanche of worst-case scenarios finally broke loose, flooding her mind with terrible images. Maybe they were dead on the kitchen floor! A burglary gone wrong! Simultaneous heart attacks! Surprise giant sandworms like in that horrible movie Tremors! Just because Meg’s acting career had tanked didn’t mean she wasn’t still dramatic as hell.

  Meg skirted the edge of the house and made her way around back. The kitchen window looked new, and the living room picture window too—they must’ve replaced them recently—but there was one into the laundry room that still had those old windows with the glass that looked flimsy and clouded.

  She bounced on her feet with indecision, looking around the back yard as if she thought the police would leap out from behind a tree and haul her off to the Big House for considered breaking and entering. Seeing no one, she picked up a rock and smashed the window.

  Her double-thick wool mittens made it easier to clear away the shards of glass still stuck in the wood frame. She reached inside and unlatched the window and slid it open. After a couple of useless hops and scrambles up the wall, she realized with a groan that she couldn’t actually hoist herself over the sill to get in.

  She searched around a bit and found an old recycling bin behind the garage and dragged it over for something to stand on so she could clamber inside. She banged an elbow and both knees climbing in over the washer and dryer.

  All the lights were off inside. Meg let out a long breath of relief when she didn’t find anybody lying on the kitchen floor, but she frowned when that breath billowed visibly in front of her.

  It was freezing cold inside.

  With increasing confusion, Meg searched through the house. No parents. Pepper, their dog, wasn’t there either, and there wasn’t any food or water left out for her. The thermostat was turned way down. And yet, Meg kept coming back to the fact that both cars were here.

  What the hell was going on?!

  Suddenly there was a rattling sound from the front door and the creak of it opening. Meg grabbed a big wooden spoon from the ceramic crock on the kitchen counter. It was the first thing in reach. Were these the burglars she’d feared? Had they been casing the joint?

  She snuck toward the hallway from the kitchen where she could get a clear view of the door and peeked around the corner. Then she lowered the spoon in surprise.

  “Mrs. Green?”

  A middle-aged woman with poofy brown hair and a long wool coat yelped and dropped her keys on the floor. Then she pressed her hand over her heart and dropped her shoulders with a huge sigh.

  “Meg?! For the love of— What on earth are you doing here?”

  Meg hid the spoon behind her back and stepped into the hallway. “I came to visit. Where are Mom and Dad?” she asked, shaking her head in confusion.

  “Why, they’re on the cruise, of course!” Mrs. Green tsked.

  “Cruise...?” Meg asked faintly.

  Mrs. Green nodded with an expression that made Meg think she suspected Meg was drunk or high or something. “The Christmas cruise,” she replied slowly. “Dow
n in the Florida Keys?” Meg opened her mouth and closed it again, and Mrs. Green sighed again. “Joanna told me she couldn’t get hold of you,” she scolded. “She said she left you a message about it.”

  Meg tried a rueful chuckle and rubbed the back of her neck in embarrassment. Her voicemail had been full for a month.

  “Well, that’s just one more example of how I fail at life,” she laughed, hoping it sounded like a self-deprecating joke and not the actual truth.

  “I guess if you’re here,” Mrs. Green went on, “you can watch the house! Here you go.” She hung the keys on a hook by the door and paused on her way out. “How have you been, anyway? We haven’t seen you in ages!”

  Meg winced as another barb of hometown guilt sunk in. “Well, things are always pretty busy in the film industry,” she replied with a weak chuckle. “I’m actually—”

  “That’s nice, dear,” Mrs. Green broke in. “It’s really convenient you’re here, actually. I have so much to do to get ready for Christmas that I didn’t have the time to look in on your parents’ house anyway!”

  “Uh,” Meg began, but Mrs. Green had already closed the door behind her. She’d never been the friendliest neighbor to begin with, but that was quite the brush-off. Meg moaned and covered her face with her hands. “Welp,” she said, muffled. “There’s the nail in the coffin of my holiday.”

  She’d driven eight hours to get here. She had no work back in the city to keep her busy over the holidays. Her last for-sure filming project had been cancelled and it had been three months since she even got a callback, in spite of sending in her headshots and reel to dozens of places and auditioning every chance she got.

  She’d finally have to admit that her career was over. Her parents were off doing something probably a hundred times more fun than spending Christmas with her, and the only thing left to do was drive all the way back to her apartment and her roommate Steve, who would be pissed because he’d planned a private week-long video-game-a-thon (and other-things-a-thon, most likely) with his boyfriend, Sven.