Free Marry-Me Christmas by Shirley Jump Page A

that Flynn didn’t bother to fill. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to work here for a little while. That way, if I have any questions while I’m writing, I can just ask them.” Meaning, he intended to probe deeper into the clues she’d dropped at dinner, but he didn’t say that. “And, I can try to connect to the Internet again.”
    “Sure.” Her voice had a slight, confused lilt at the end. She put the sheet of cookies into the oven, then started filling another one.
    Keeping his back to her, Flynn sought the familiarity of his word processing program. He tugged his notepad out of his bag and began typing. The words did what they always did—provided a cold, objective distance. It was as if the bright white of the screen and the stark blackness of the letters erased all emotion, scrubbed away any sense of Flynn’s personality. He became an outside observer, reporting facts.
    And nothing else.
    He wrote for ten minutes, his fingers moving so fast, the words swam before his eyes. Usually, when he wrote a story, pulling the paragraphs out of his brain was like using camels to drag a mule through the mud. He’d never been a fast writer, more a deliberate one.
    But this time, it seemed as if his brain couldn’t keep up with his hands. He wrote until his fingers began to hurt from the furious movement across the keyboard. When he sat back and looked at the page count, he was stunned to see he had five solid pages in the file already.
    Flynn scrolled up to the opening paragraph, expecting his usual “Established in blah-blah year, this business” opening, followed by the punch of personal information, the tabloid zing he was known for. Nearly all his stories had that straightforward, get-to-the-facts approach that led to the one nugget everyone else had missed. It was what his editor liked about him. He delivered the information, with a minimal peppering of adjectives.
    “Can I read it?” Sam asked.
    He hadn’t even realized she had moved up behind him. But now he was aware, very aware. He jerked back to the real world, to the scent of fresh-baked cookies, and to Samantha Barnett, standing right behind him.
    “Uh, sure. Keep in mind it’s a first draft,” he said. “And it’s just the facts, none of the fluff kind of thing the airline magazine…” His voice trailed off as his eyes connected with the first few paragraphs on the screen.
    “Visions of sugar plums dance in the air. The sweet perfume of chocolate hangs like a cloud. And standing amidst the magic of this Christmas joy, like the star atop a tree, is the owner of Joyful Creations, Samantha Barnett.
    “She knows every customer by name, and has a smile for everyone who walks through the door of her shop, no matter how many muffins she’s baked or how many cookies she’s boxed that day. She’s as sweet as the treats in her cases….”
    Flynn slammed the top of the laptop shut. What the hell was that?
    “Wow.” A slow smile spread across Sam’s face. “And here I thought you were going to write one of those scathing exposés, the kind I’ve heard the magazine is famous for. I mean, you barely tasted any of the food here and…”
    “And what?” he asked, scowling. He did not write that kind of drivel. He was known as a bulldog, the writer that went for the jugular, got the story at all costs. Not this sweet-penning novelist wanna-be.
    “And well…it didn’t seem like you liked me.”
    He didn’t know how to answer that. Did he like her? And what did it matter if he did or didn’t? He’d be leaving this town the second his car was fixed and the roads were clear. After that, Samantha Barnett would simply be one more file among the dozens in his cabinet. “I don’t like this town. It’s a little too remote for me.” That didn’t answer the question of whether he liked her, he realized.
    Either way, his editor was expecting a Flynn MacGregor story. The kind free of emotion, but steeped in details no other publication had