Let It Snow (Snow Creek Book 1)

  Let It Snow

  A Snow Creek Novella

  by Cecilia Gray

  The Snow Creek series features original novellas by seven New York Times, USA Today, Amazon and iBooks Bestselling authors, all set in the same cozy, California mountain community.

  While the characters interact and run into each other's book, each novella can be read individually.

  Let It Snow Synopsis

  After losing her parents, Jessica can't bear to lose her childhood home and family bookstore, too. When they're taken from her, she has nowhere to go…except the arms of Daniel, Snow Creek's resident hero paramedic. It's not the Christmas miracle Jessica wanted, but it might the one she needs….

  Prologue

  Christmas Eve, Last Year

  The sheriff sighed at her from the sidewalk through the glass door. He hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his black dress pants. A penguin suit wasn’t his usual style but it was Christmas Eve, the night of Snow Creek’s Fezziwig Ball, and everyone was expected.

  Everyone except Jessica Mendez. She and her two left feet had never attended. Maybe she would have gone this year—at least that’s what she told herself—but she had other fish to fry. Really big fish.

  “Do you understand what you’re doin’, darlin’?” the sheriff called. His white handlebar moustache curled up with amusement, the way it used to when she snuck in on him and her Papi’s late-night poker games when she should’ve been asleep.

  Jessica didn’t have a clue what she was doing, but that had never stopped her before. She turned the two deadbolts on Books and Crannies’ front door, locking herself inside.

  Snow fell on the small crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk behind the sheriff dressed in his finery. Even Joe had on his cowboy best. Everyone looked ready to party. Well, except for Miss Bonny in a dress so plain you would have thought she was going to church. They should have been on their way to enjoy their Christmas Eve, but were here instead. Jessica drew strength from their support, particularly the dirty looks they cast the stuffy suits who were trying to evict her.

  “Well, gentlemen,” the sheriff said with a helpless shrug. “Looks like the lady is locked in.”

  “You can’t let her do this.” The developers jabbed their pointy fingers at her through the glass. “This is blatant preferential treatment—it’s discrimination against us.”

  “It’s Christmas Eve, is what it is,” the sheriff replied wryly. “As entertaining as this freak show might be, I got me a ball to get to, with the entire town of guests to watch over. Now go on home.” He turned away from the bookshop, taking the curious crowd and the red-faced, bloated suits demanding justice with him.

  Jessica’s knees weakened as she watched them leave. She backed up until her waist hit the book display behind her. What had she just done?

  She was notorious for her imagination, but couldn’t daydream her way out of this. Which was surprising because Jessica had a head for daydreams. Everyone said so, from teachers who had cautioned she had trouble concentrating in class, to friends who always snapped their fingers when she drifted off in the midst of salacious gossip. It was even the last thing her parents had said to her.

  Don't daydream away our customers while we're gone.

  Jessica had just graduated with her degree in communications. She’d paid her dues by taking online college classes and saved money by living at home and working in the bookstore. Not the most glamorous way to earn a diploma, but she’d garnered a portfolio of magazine articles and she’d been debt-free, more than she could say for some of her friends, which meant she could take a low-paying internship at a San Francisco travel magazine.

  The lure of the city, the promise of travel assignments, and the idea of a fresh start where she could reinvent herself as more than a shy bookworm practically had her twirling with glee. She’d had one weekend left to watch the store before the new manager started so her parents could take a much deserved second honeymoon.

  “Don’t daydream away our customers,” her parents had said. It had been a joke.

  Jessica had rolled her eyes and shooed them away with a teasing command: “Don’t bring back a baby sister.”

  Only her parents hadn’t come back—at least not alive. She had buried them beneath Snow Creek’s cold, snow-packed ground in the cemetery of the same church where they had been married. The next few months had been a blur of grief, so when the new manager had offered to take over the bookstore’s accounting and taxes and inventory management, she’d gladly accepted.

  She hadn’t realized her mistake until it was too late and the money was all gone.

  Don't daydream away the customers? She'd forced them out by failing her parents. Now she had to make right what she’d made wrong, one way or another. She had to save the bookstore that had been in her family for three generations. She had to protect the legacy her parents had entrusted her with.

  If she could just keep the developers from taking possession of the bookstore until the insurance company finished their investigation and paid off her parents’ policy, then she could get the store back on its feet. This time she wouldn’t turn the management over to anyone else. So what if she had to give up her dream of being a travel writer? Wasn’t her parents’ dream and legacy just as important?

  Jessica turned back towards the store and cringed at the lack of holiday cheer. The display books were still the old, sun-drenched beach covers from summer. She hadn’t thought to drag the Christmas tree down from storage in the apartment upstairs because it was always something her father had done. It hit her then that she was alone.

  It was Christmas and there was no tree, none of her mother’s stuffing that always ended up being more like bread soup, no gifts that she’d gleefully spent months hiding and no off-key rendition of "Feliz Navidad". She swallowed hard again, refusing to feel sorry for herself, because once she cried she might not stop.

  Jessica heard a rustling by the door and spun around, expecting to find the suits with a crowbar.

  Instead she found Daniel Hennessey. All six foot three of towering lean muscles, tousled brown hair, piercing green eyes, and chiseled cheekbones stood outside her door. She couldn’t help staring. He’d always been hot enough to melt the ice off The Pond in January. If only he were the book reading type. The sexy ones rarely were.

  Still, he was standing outside Books and Crannies and studying it the way he used to study his anatomy textbook in high school—with complete focus. Which was helpful since that focus meant he rarely realized that she and legions of other girls were studying him instead.

  Daniel ducked his head as if to peer inside. She waved but he didn't reciprocate. She realized he couldn’t see her, not with the lights off in the store and daylight still shining outside. It gave her the courage to take a step closer and just…look at him.

  A moment later, he turned away.

  She let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. After a few more seconds staring at the empty sidewalk, she wondered if she had imagined him. It wouldn’t be the first time. Like most girls…and a handful of guys…in Snow Creek, Jessica had a healthy portfolio of fantasies surrounding Daniel Hennessey.

  She was walking towards the door, intending to see where he’d gone, when he returned, looming just in front of her, and she froze. She watched as he hammered a wreath to her front door, laid his palm against the glass and squinted to try to see inside. She held her breath but his gaze swept over her in the shadows once, then twice. He turned and walked away.

  Chapter One

  Monday, December 18th – One Year Later

  Jessica put the finishing touches on her video. Her half a million YouTube subscribers had been begging
for this one—helpful hints on how to kill time when snowed in at airports. As someone who had been trapped in her own virtual prison for an entire year, she could more than compete with the other travel channels in that arena.

  She uploaded the video, then posted an update announcing the new material on her website, The Armchair Adventurer, and her corresponding social media accounts–just one of the many ways she passed time this last year.

  She rubbed at the sore crick in her left shoulder from sitting on her butt all night, taking way longer than she should have on her audio quality. It was hard to compete with those travel vloggers who could actually leave their homes, so she had to make sure her videos were spot on in every other way.

  With a groan she stood, stretched her legs, and walked down the spiral staircase from the tiny two-bedroom apartment into the retail bookstore, pajamas and all. She parted the heavy black curtain panels and pressed her nose against the cold glass, behind the black letter typography of Books and Crannies. Her view of Main Street was partially obstructed by the half-dozen eviction notices taped to the other side of the storefront window, not to mention the heavy plank boards that the developer had nailed over the window for good measure.

  Of course not mentioning the planks didn’t make them any less of an ominous reminder that the developers who bought the note meant business. They had spent a year fighting her squatting in court. After growing tired of the sheriff’s continual excuses not to evict her—the Snow Creek spring parade, the Independence Day fireworks, the Halloween Hullabaloo—they’d hired some poor PI to park across the street on the off chance she ever came out so he could rush in and take over. If she didn’t have the support of the sheriff….well….she didn’t know what she’d do.

  She’d been petitioning for free legal support to see if anyone could help recover the money that had been stolen. She’d even written, and been featured in, a few local news stories, but hadn’t felt right accepting hard-earned money from the community when there were so many other causes that they could support. Besides, this was her mess. She had to fix it.

  And fix it meant not leaving. Ever.

  Ha—as if she’d leave. Now that she had some money coming in from her YouTube channel and the occasional freelance article, she was more secure than ever. If those bastards wanted her gone, they’d have to raze the bookstore with her in it.

  The dire thought always led to a daydream—of Daniel Hennessey desperately digging through the rubble to find her, and then cradling her limp body in his arms before raising a desperate fist to the sky with a cry of “Noooooooo.” His impassioned kiss would revive her, and from there it was a short leap to 2.5 children and a white picket fence.

  Her ever-changing reel of Daniel Hennessey fantasies served her nicely on those days when she thought she’d go batshit sitting in the same place for so long. He’d fueled her fantasies even more by becoming a paramedic and showing up on Main Street constantly in uniform while she was locked up.

  Speaking of Daniel, why was he late? Daniel Hennessey was never late. Scratch that. There had been those two days after the avalanche. He hadn't come down from the mountain until he'd given Paul McAlester himself reason to pin a medal on Daniel’s chest where it had gleamed next to his St. Christopher’s medallion. She had watched the award ceremony take place in the town square from inside the bookstore, envying the women who got to give him a congratulatory hug. Not that Daniel needed medals to get a woman’s attention.

  With a sigh, her breath frosted the storefront window, and the white winter wonderland that she’d dubbed “a snow globe come to life” in her recently published Sunset Magazine feature, fogged in front of her eyes. She wiped at the glass with her sleeve.

  Jessica lightly slapped her cheeks with chilly-tipped fingers and squinted out the window again. A nonoperational bookstore didn’t offer many other diversions, and much about the view was the same every day.

  But some things did change, like the Christmas decorations that just went up. She could almost smell the fresh greenery decorating the storefronts. Someone had even taken the time to hang another wreath on her door, and although she hadn’t been awake to see who, she liked to think it was Daniel again.

  Where was he, anyway? She waited patiently for her daily glimpse of the smile that may as well have been a Taser to her heart. As if his smile, his good looks, and his immediate rise in stature as a town hero after the avalanche wasn’t enough to swoon over, he’d recently adopted a new puppy who obviously adored him, and he was constantly helping little old ladies cross the street so they wouldn’t slip in the snow. Unfortunately, he also helped hot, blonde ski bunnies cross the street. He was annoyingly egalitarian like that.

  He was living the life she could only imagine. Saving lives. Daredevil feats the local weblog reported on all the time. Yet between all that, at noon sharp every day, Daniel parked his paramedic van in front of the emergency call center down the street, went inside for a few minutes for whatever paperwork he had to do, then tied up his puppy and ran to Rosie's Bakery for coffee. But not today.

  Maybe he'd crashed his paramedic van while rushing a poor transplant victim from the mountain to the helipad. No, that would have made the news. Maybe he was being held captive, chained to a bed by a serial killer. Or worse, a woman.

  Her fingernails drummed the window pane. Nothing bad could really have happened to him, right?

  She heard a thump. Another. She glanced down. Daniel's scruffy golden Labrador was pacing outside her window. The puppy placed her padded paws on the glass pane and wagged her eager tail.

  "Mitten!" Jessica crouched to the puppy’s eye level and smiled back at her eager, panting face. Mitten knocked her head into the window with another thump. "Where did you come from, girl?"

  If Mitten was here, Daniel must be close by. Jessica’s gaze strayed to the silver collar around Mitten's neck. "If you find Mitten, please call Daniel Hennessey. Please also scold Mitten for running away." She had imagined calling the number many times while making Mitten’s acquaintance from the sidewalk with the glass between them.

  Hi Daniel, it's Jessica Mendez. You probably don’t remember me from high school. Let's get coffee. I already know how you take it. Black, no sugar. Exactly like I do. That makes us soul mates, right? Well, that and your smile with those dimples and God, your eyes that I can tell are green from across the street and your ridiculously hot body. Do you stencil your abs? Since when are ab lines visible beneath T-shirts? What? A stalker? Me? No, I don't stalk you, silly, I can't leave this bookstore or they’ll demolish it for a timeshare office. How could I possibly stalk you?

  Cue the hysterical laughter.

  Mitten barked.

  "Shhh, it’s okay, girl." Jessica ran her hand along the glass, tracing the slope of Mitten's head on the other side. She often wished she could touch Mitten for real. That was another thing she’d imagined over and over. Opening the front door, stepping outside and scooping up Mitten, right before running into Daniel’s arms for a back-bending embrace. Not suffocating Mitten between them was always a problem in this particular daydream.

  She pulled her bottom lip, wondering what she could get away with. The PI across the street was asleep behind the wheel in his car, head tilted back and mouth open. Maybe she could open the door the tiniest bit so Mitten could squeeze into the bookstore. Dognapping Mitten. That was one way to make an impression on Daniel.

  Mitten whined softly.

  "I haven't forgotten you." Jessica ran her fingers along the glass. She imagined running her fingers through the soft, golden coat, scratching the back of her ears. Mitten wagged her tail and turned away. She pranced up and down the sidewalk, her delicate paws pressing into the snow. Jessica giggled at the show. Then, Mitten froze. Her ears bared low against the sides of her head. She lowered herself to the ground.

  Jessica followed her line of sight…across the street to a squirrel at the base of a tree clutching a nut in its tiny claws.

  "Mitten," she whispered, tapp
ing the window. "Don't do it, honey. No, no, no, look at me. Squirrels are carriers of disease."

  Mitten growled louder and bared her teeth. Then she darted across the street just as a Jeep turned right from Sierra Drive.

  Jessica bolted to the door, her hand on the knob. Before she had a chance to think, she was sprinting into the road, the chilly wind cutting through her thin pajamas. She bent down and scooped Mitten into her arms and made it safely across the street just as she heard the squeal of tires. The puppy was as soft and downy as she'd imagined, although her paws were wet and cold. A heavenly smell of baked bread and cinnamon wafted from the bakery. God, she’d missed that smell.

  Scent, sound, and sensation all swirled around her. Then the fuzzy slippers she wore caught and spun in the snow. She clutched Mitten tighter as she felt herself going down, felt a sharp blow to the back of her head.

  And everything went black.

  ***

  Daniel checked her vitals. Her pulse was thready but her breathing was even and regular. Her pupils dilated when he shone his light in them, but their response was slower than he would have liked. Mitten was going apeshit, barking and turning in circles.

  "You're on my list, Mitten," he said sternly. He'd gone crazy looking for her after she had bolted between his legs the second she locked eyes on the travel crate. He'd run after her, not thinking he'd have to chase the damn dog to hell and back. Even though her legs were no bigger than his pinky, she was fast. He’d finally gone back for his paramedic’s van thinking he’d cover more ground and had made it downtown just in time to see Mitten jump into Jessica Mendez’s arms as the Jeep rounded the corner.

  In the past year, Daniel had jumped out of planes, skied the most dangerous slopes in the world, and zip-lined over a volcano. He'd trached an asthmatic with a ballpoint pen, delivered a baby in the back of a Pinto, and splinted his own broken ankle halfway up a mountain while on a solo hike. But nothing had scared him more than the sight of Jessica running into the street.