Not Just For Christmas: A Holiday Romance (Love at Christmas) Read online

  Copyright 2017 by Hazel Redgate

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced

  in any form, in whole or in part, without written

  permission from the author.

  Other books from Hazel Redgate:

  Love at Christmas

  Not Just For Christmas

  White Christmas

  Last Christmas

  Home For Christmas

  Love at Christmas: Four Holiday Romances

  Bad Boy Musicians

  Reckless – Coming 2018

  Smooth – Coming 2018

  Find more at hazelredgate.com

  Not Just For Christmas

  On the rug in the Marsh family living room, beneath the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree, Baxter yawned lazily, stretching his snaggletoothed mouth wide before settling down to the hard work of yet another nap. He lowered his head down to the floor and closed his eyes, letting his tongue loll out onto the carpeting. He had been at the Marsh house for a grand total of two hours, and had already made himself well and truly at home.

  The women on the couch watched him with a mixture of fascination and disgust. ‘So you bought a dog?’ Patricia asked, in a voice that suggested not so much surprise that her daughter had decided to make the leap into dog ownership but faint concern that this was the dog she had apparently chosen.

  ‘I didn’t buy a dog.’

  ‘You adopted a dog?’

  Jo sighed. ‘No, Mom. I’m just sitting, that’s all.’

  ‘Because if this is because you’re lonely…’

  And there it was. It had been over eighteen months since she had signed the papers, erasing four years of marriage with a single flick of a pen, but everything she did now – perhaps everything she ever would do from now on, at least in certain people’s eyes – was viewed through that particular lens. Get a new haircut? Obviously she was trying to reinvent herself. Go out? Obviously she was trying to live it up, now she had her freedom back. Stay in? Obviously she was too depressed by everything that had happened to even set foot outside, poor dear. There was nothing she could do that didn’t come back to the fact that somehow, while she wasn’t watching, her marriage had sputtered to a halt.

  Not that she had been altogether sad to see it go, of course; by the end of it, she and Richard had been little more than roommates. When they weren’t arguing, which was bad, there was silence, which was far, far worse: a silence that had descended on the two of them, as thick and as cloying as a snowfall that stifled everything beneath it, turning it to monotonous white. At various points in the last two years, she had wondered if it would have been easier if there was more to it than that – if she had found him with his pants around his ankles and with another woman in their marital bed, for example. Then she would have known for sure that things were over. She would have had the firm moment that she could point to and say, ‘Yep, that’s where it all went wrong: when I came home from work twenty minutes early and found him ploughing the woman who lives across the street.’ By the time they had sat down to have that final conversation, the one where they both admitted that they’d made a mistake and it just wasn’t working out anymore, that ‘Til Death Do Us Part and For As Long As You Both Shall Live had started to seem less like promises and more like prison sentences, she doubted she even would have cared.

  The divorce itself had been pretty painless. No contest, no fault, no problem dividing up the assets. Richard wanted out just as much as she did, so neither one of them had any vested interest in dragging their feet. It had seemed too easy, almost – positively ridiculous that something that had once felt so meaningful could be dispensed with an act as familiar, as mundane, as absolutely second-nature as giving her signature – but that hadn’t changed the fact. One minute, she was married; the next, alone.

  Alone, yes. But not lonely. Oh, no. There was no way she’d admit to that.

  ‘I’m fine, Mom,’ she said. ‘It’s just a favour for a friend. No big deal.’

  Well… sort of.

  Mrs. Rodriguez wasn’t so much a friend as she was a passing acquaintance, that breed of neighbour that is little more than a nodding acquaintance in the hall until she wants something and finds herself working down her list of people who could help her out. It was little things, to start with – using her phone to call the electric company, rides to the supermarket, that sort of thing – but by the time Mrs Rodriguez announced that she’d be spending three weeks in Australia over the Christmas break, sunning herself on a beach down under while the Connecticut winter was at its peak, Jo had grown so used to her little requests that she had agreed to watch Baxter almost without thinking about it. Immediately she had found herself the owner of the full Baxter Rodriguez Care Kit: bags of dried food, a rainbow of rubber squeaky toys, and what seemed like enough medication to stock a mid-sized veterinary hospital. Before she had figured out a way to subtly suggest that maybe this wasn’t the best idea – that she also had plans for the Christmas vacation, staying with her family for a couple of days – she had driven Mrs Rodriguez to the airport and taken possession of a patchy, growly mass of fur and slobber that, if you squinted a little bit, might have passed for a dog.

  Baxter sneezed in his sleep, sending a fine spray of mist into the air above his head that didn’t seem to faze him one bit.

  Her mother’s brow crinkled. ‘If you say so.’

  Jo knew that tone a little too well. If you say so was her mother’s way of saying I know that’s not true, but I’m not going to fight you on it. Confrontation had never been a big thing in the Marsh family, especially not at Christmastime. With four daughters in the house – well, three this year, with Amy away – it was a case of taking every possible precaution to ensure an easy life.

  She loved her mother – really, she did; unreservedly and without question – but that didn’t change the fact that Patricia Marsh didn’t know the first thing when it came to dealing with a divorce. She and Jo’s father had always been happy; to Jo’s knowledge, in over thirty years of marriage they had never had a fight about anything more contentious than whose turn it was to unload the dishwasher. She had begun dating George Marsh at nineteen and was married by twenty-three, and in that whole time she had never come home to an empty house, or had to deal with the pity of everyone she knew: the Oh, what a shames, the There, there, honeys, the incessant requests for her to smile or think herself lucky that things had disintegrated early, before the two of them had had kids, as though that somehow made her own situation easier to bear. Her mother had certainly never tried to re-enter the dating scene as a grown woman, that was for sure – and what a minefield that had become in the eight or so years since she had first met Richard. The last time she dated, she was young and fresh and vibrant, still in college. Now, she felt like an old maid on any dating site she dared to set up a profile on. For God’s sake, she told herself, you’re only thirty-two – but thirty-two might as well have been a hundred by comparison to the wave after wave of permatanned and perfectly-coiffed Instagram-model-wannabe twentysomethings that she was up against. Between that and the tsunami of dick pics that had followed her setting up an account – really, had that ever worked for anyone? Was there a penis in all of human history so beautiful that it could make any woman swoon? – she had closed it relatively quickly. She wasn’t even sure if she was ready to start dating again properly, or if that was even a thing she wanted. Given the option, she tried not to think too hard about it. That way, she knew, madness lay.

  It was easier said than done with her mother around, though. That was the thing about close-knit fami
lies: the idea that there might be some things you wanted to keep to yourself just didn’t occur to them. If she had told her mother that she just needed a little space, she might as well have declared that she was just heading off for a quick jaunt to the moon and back. Thankfully, for three blissful weeks, she had an immediate out.

  ‘I’m going to take the dog for a walk,’ she announced.

  Baxter didn’t so much as stir.

  ~~~

  Jo pulled her scarf in close around her face, but it did precious little against the cold Connecticut winter. A fierce wind had risen up in the half-hour or so since she had decided it was better to get out of the house and take Baxter with her, and the same gusts that were sending up flurries of flakes from the snow already thick on the ground were like shards of glass against her cheeks. She had regretted heading out pretty much the second she had set foot onto the street, but even without her mother looming over her, she hadn’t had much choice. Baxter’s aged canine bladder wouldn’t have lasted all that much longer without a trip outside, and unless she wanted to spend the entirety of her Christmas break on her knees, scrubbing yellow stains out of the carpet and laying down sheet after sheet of newspaper, her hands were pretty much tied.

  Baxter, on the other hand, seemed completely unperturbed by the cold. He had merrily cocked his leg against pretty much every vertical structure since they had left the Marsh house, from the side of George Marsh’s car to the commemorative bench in Benbrook Park and God-only-knew how many lampposts and mailboxes in between, claiming the land as his own. He didn’t feel out of place, oh no. He had managed to make himself feel right at home.

  That was the funny thing about leaving. She had grown up on these streets; she had skinned her knees, dropped ice cream cones, played ball in exactly the same places she was walking now. She had had her first kiss on the corner of Ridge and Lakeside, a boy in her class – Johnny? James? Jerry? – who had pulled her in close after she had spent a summer mooning over him in the way that only a fifteen-year-old girl who thinks she’s in love can. (When Baxter cocked his leg there, she hurried him along before he could do his business; some memories, no matter how hazy, were sacred.) She belonged here… and yet, she didn’t. She hadn’t belonged here in years. She had made the decision to move away – to college first, although even then only as far as Penn State; it was her sisters who would later go on to make it to a top-flight music school and an Ivy League postgrad respectively, while she chose her university based on the strict criteria of ‘whoever would take me’. After that, after Richard, they had settled in a little town about forty minutes away. And what was forty minutes? Forty minutes was nothing. On a map of the country, it barely even registered. You could throw a stone further than that, if you really tried your hardest.

  So why did she feel so much like a stranger in a strange land, when even the dog managed to fit right in?

  With a heavy sigh, she brushed two inches of accumulated snow off the park bench and sat down hard. Baxter looked up at her, his tongue lolling – as ever – out of the side of his mouth. ‘Put that away,’ she said. ‘It’ll freeze, you know. And then what are you going to do, eh?’

  Baxter tilted his head to one side, confused as ever.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said, and then sighed to herself. Is this what people do? she thought. Grow old, get a dog, and spend the rest of their lives talking to it like it’s a person? Surely not. Although…

  Well, it had been a while since she had had a decent conversation with another human being. Most of the people she knew from work were acquaintances at best, the kind of people you could spend eight tolerable hours a day with and then feel perfectly satisfied never thinking about them again. As for her friends, Richard had managed to snag most of them in the divorce. That was the problem with being part of a couple for eight years: it was very easy to put all of your eggs in one basket. Sure, they all claimed that they were still her friends, and after eight years she should damn well hope so… but when it came down to it, they could only really invite one of them to dinner without it being awkward, and over the past eighteen months the invitations for Richard to join them had stayed steady while the offers she received had dwindled down to almost nothing. That was before you even got onto dating, and the string of idle chitchat with perfect strangers that really only boiled down to an interview with two questions: are we going to take this to the bedroom, and if we do, how likely is it that one of us will call the other afterwards?

  Isn’t that just the saddest thing? she thought as she looked down into Baxter’s mottled brown eyes. You might just be the most meaningful relationship I’ve formed in the past year and a half.

  Was that how people decided to get dogs? The Marshes had never had pets when the girls were growing up, that Jo could remember; Meg might have had a hamster or a guinea pig when she was little, but by that point Jo had long since moved out. Having a dog around the house was practically unheard of, and frankly, Jo had never really seen the appeal. Having a dog was responsibility. It was vet bills and check-ups. It was resigning yourself to lost security deposits and the fact that you’d never have good, unchewed furniture again. It was long walks no matter how dismal the weather, not to mention bags full of poop that you were expected to carry around with you. Of course, none of that had mattered once she started dating Richard – Richard, who was horribly allergic to everything hairier than a beach ball and who didn’t really have the pet-owner sensibility to begin with. ‘Why would anyone ever want to invite a wild animal into their home?’ he had said whenever one of their friends announced that they had made the leap. ‘It’s unhygienic – and they’re practically wolves, you know.’ Jo had nodded along, even though she never quite bought the idea that their friends Ron and Adam’s new puggle was evolutionarily closer to a wolf than it was to, say, a stuffed toy.

  But Richard was gone now, and she was alone in an empty apartment. She could imagine that, maybe: coming home not to silence and cold, but to the attention and unconditional love of an eager little fuzzball. It was appealing, in a way she’d never previously considered. Maybe it could work.

  She reached over, and with a gloved hand she mussed the top of his head affectionately. ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘See? You’re not such a bad dog after all. In fact–’

  Whatever she was going to say, it was lost in the furore of what happened next. A small winter bird had landed on the ground a little way away from them, pecking at the frozen dirt with its beak. Evidently it had got a little too close for comfort; with an almighty lunge, Baxter pulled his body forward, jerked the leash out of Jo’s hands and took off at a run towards it.

  The bird was quicker that he was, no matter how hungry it might have been. It rose into the air on shaky wings, well out of Baxter’s reach, but the dog was either too dumb or too stubborn to give up the chase that easily. As the bird flew away, he tore after it.

  ‘Baxter!’ she yelled. ‘Baxter, get back here!’

  He didn’t pay her the slightest bit of notice, let alone turn around. The last she saw of him was streak of grey churning up the snow as he went, racing across the field until he was little more than a speck in the distance.

  Baxter was gone.

  ~~~

  ‘Baxter! Baxter!’

  Jo shivered. How long had it been since he had slipped his leash and taken off over the field? An hour? Two? It was hard to say for sure. All she knew was that she was chilled to the bone, and not even the panicked adrenaline she had felt watching him scamper away along the field was enough to keep her warm now.

  She had followed the trail of his footprints as far as she could – thankfully, the snowfall had been recent and the covering across the park was mostly pristine and untouched – but it hadn’t been long before the streak of pawprints had taken her to the edge of a patch of trees, and she lost sight of him. After that, he might as well have vanished into thin air. No matter how many times she called out to him, all she heard back was the muted echo of her voice on the snow.


  Well, shit, she thought. What am I supposed to do now? Night was drawing in, and beneath the white clouds the sun was already nuzzling the horizon. It wouldn’t be long before dark, and then she really would be out of options.

  Head home, she told herself. That’s all you can do. Get Mom and Dad to help you out – maybe drive around the neighbourhood looking for him. On the one hand, she knew it was the right call; the three of them would cover far more ground than she could on her own, and the car headlights would be invaluable once the last traces of light slipped away. On the other hand, though, she resented having to ask her parents for help. She was a grown woman, for God’s sake; she should have been perfectly capable of looking after a dog for a couple of weeks without losing it in a park.

  Well, she could add it to the list of things she had managed to screw up in the last couple of years. It was getting pretty full, but she was sure she’d be able to find room for it somewhere.

  She trudged her way home, checking down every side street along the way and hoping – praying – that she wouldn’t see a grey patch of fur on the street, where Baxter had run out into the path of an oncoming car and…

  Eurgh. It didn’t bear thinking about. Sure, he was dumb – almost aggressively so, in fact; he didn’t seem to know which way was up half the time – but she had grown sort of attached to him over the past week or so. When he wasn’t drooling against the rug or scratching himself against every vertical surface in the house, he was… well, no, then he seemed to be either farting or thinking about farting; the Marshes were either too polite or too reserved to comment on it, but the mangy little furball could clear a room in an instant. But when he wasn’t doing any of that, he was… sort of cute? Almost? In a weird kind of way?

  None of that was to mention the fact that she’d have to explain to Mrs Rodriguez that she had lost her dog. The woman was, what, seventy years old? Maybe eighty? For all Jo knew, that dog was the best friend she had in the world – maybe the only thing keeping her going. That was all she needed: for her elderly neighbour to get back from an idyllic three-week vacation and immediately drop dead of a heart attack at the news that her beloved four-legged companion had run away in the middle of winter, and was probably a four-legged popsicle by now.