Getting In the Spirit: a Sapphire Falls novella Read Free Page B

buy the healthy cereal. Or maybe the time after that.
    “I have and I love it,” Kate said.
    Phoebe shook her head. “Try scooping it out of your driveway and scraping your windshield every morning for about four months, you’ll get over it.”
    “Isn’t that what you have that gorgeous, hunky husband for?” Kate teased.
    Phoebe grinned. “Well, yeah, now . But I had to teach him to scrape and shovel. He grew up in Vegas.”
    And he’d been darned cute the first time he’d tried to maneuver the snow blower. Phoebe grinned, remembering him banging into the house, proclaiming he was about to die of frost bite if she didn’t warm him up immediately. They’d been naked and very, very warm within minutes.
    “So get on a plane and go somewhere with snow,” Phoebe said. “If that’s all you need to feel better about the best holiday all year, then that’s easy.”
    “Oh, it’s not just the Hawaii and snow thing,” Kate said. “The past three Christmases, I’ve had boyfriend issues. This year, I’m staying inside. Away from Christmas and guys and any thoughts of combining the two. I’m going to hunker down with junk food and Marvel until New Year’s is past. Then I’m going to get up, go back to my regular routine and forget there even was a Christmas this year.”
    “You can’t do that,” Phoebe protested. She loved Christmas. Everything about it. And Sapphire Falls did Christmas big. It was like every holiday movie, song or story ever told. She hated the idea her friend would be down on Christmas.
    “I can,” Kate assured her. “I’ll be okay.”
    “Tell me about these guys that have ruined Christmas for you.”
    Kate sighed. “Three years ago, I caught my boyfriend kissing one of the girls I work with at our Christmas party. Cliché, I know, but it hurt.”
    “Of course it did,” Phoebe said sympathetically.
    “The next year, my boyfriend dumped me on Christmas Day. We were supposed to have dinner with his family, and at the last minute, he decided that he wasn’t serious enough about me to introduce me to his parents. We’d been dating exclusively for six months at that point. I decided if he wasn’t serious by then, he wouldn’t be serious.”
    “I think that was a good choice.” Phoebe mentally thanked Heaven for Joe. She’d found the man of her dreams and she was never going to have to be back out there dating ever again.
    “And then last year, my boyfriend stole two of my credit cards and my car. On Christmas Eve.”
    Phoebe gasped. The two women in the aisle with her—one of them the mother of one of Phoebe’s students and the other her aunt Karen—both looked over. She gave them a smile and a wave.
    “Wow, honey, you have had a rough few Christmases.”
    “I’ve never had a good Christmas.” Kate sounded totally dejected. “I can’t handle watching it all happen around me. People are walking along the sidewalks, holding hands, picking out gifts. I turn on the TV and it’s all these movies about falling in love at Christmas. I turn on the radio and it’s all about it being cold outside—which it’s not here—and how people are rocking around the Christmas tree. While I’m here alone wishing I could be rocking under the Christmas tree. I can’t take it.”
    Phoebe snorted. “You have a Christmas tree fantasy?”
    “I do,” Kate said with feeling. “I really do. The room’s dark, the only lights on are from the fireplace and the lights on the tree…” She trailed off. “But I don’t even have a fireplace.”
    Phoebe stopped with a bunch of bananas in hand. “Tell me you have a tree, Kate,” she said. “Please tell me you have a tree.”
    “Nope. No tree. I told you, no Christmas here this year.”
    Well, that was unacceptable.
    “You need to go buy a plane ticket,” Phoebe decided. “I have snow, a tree, a fireplace and…” She thought fast. She couldn’t let this sweet woman spend the holiday alone ignoring that there even was a holiday. What Kate