Free Christmas With Tiffany by Carolynn Carey Page B

she
waited, and then the delivery man would bring her gorgeous ornaments, the ornaments
she was counting on to sell in large quantities at the open house. If they sold
well enough, she might be able to afford that smart phone for Holly for
Christmas.
    And if she wasn’t lucky, Bain would come
back to the shop. She didn’t want to see him. Not now. Not ever.   But she would love to know what he was
doing back in Rushville. When he moved to California after their senior year,
it seemed to her that he’d shaken the dust of Rushville off his shoes when he
left and that he never looked back.
    So what was he doing
here now, eight years after he’d turned his back on her and broken her heart?
    *
* *
    Bain Lyndhurst leaned
back in the soft leather chair behind his huge desk in the CEO’s office of the
Home for the Holidays Hotel located in the tourist mecca of Crow’s Creek,
Tennessee, just thirty-two miles from his old stomping grounds in Rushville.
Eight years ago, when he and his parents had moved to California, he would have
laughed if anyone had suggested he might someday be living in Tennessee again.
    Not that he was unhappy
about the location, just surprised. He’d only been with the HHH Company for a
little over four years, and he hadn’t expected to be moved up the ladder so
quickly. The Crow’s Creek hotel was a huge one, and there’d been more than one
manager interested in the position. Bain wondered if his having lived in the
area in the past had given him a leg up on his competitors for the job.
    Of course when he’d
lived in Rushville, Crow’s Creek had just been a wide place in the road with a
couple of motels and one small amusement park. But its proximity to the Smoky
Mountains had started drawing crowds, and its growth had been phenomenal in the
last few years. Hotels had started springing up almost on a monthly basis, and
the HHH Company had seen an opportunity for their year-round Christmas-themed
hotel.
      Bain reached for the phone sitting atop
his gleaming mahogany desk, then paused, his hand
hovering over the receiver. He had the phone number for Tiffany’s Gift Shop.
He’d gotten it from that cute redhead who was obviously little Holly Elwood
almost grown up. He’d have recognized Tiffany’s baby sister even if she hadn’t
been in Tiffany’s shop. Both had those amazingly green eyes and strawberry
blonde hair. His heart gave a funny little flip when he remembered just how
much he’d once loved running his fingers through Tiffany’s long hair. He really
wanted to give her a call and see how she was doing after all these years but
he couldn’t help wondering if she would object to hearing from him. After all,
their breakup hadn’t been exactly cordial.
    But blast it all, he wanted to hear her voice again. Memories of their
high school passion had inundated him when he first climbed out of his rental car
in Crow’s Creek.   No matter how much
the place had changed, the air felt the same as it had back in the days when he
used to drive Tiffany up here for a dinner away from prying eyes in Rushville.
And the smell was the same—that combination of earth and pine that
suggested the nearby mountains had imbued the air around them with their
essence.
    Darn, but he was
becoming sentimental. That wasn’t like him. He’d trained himself to be
practical, pragmatic, a realist. That’s what he needed
to be in the business world, and that’s what he had become.
    But he still wanted to
talk to Tiffany.
    He picked up the
receiver.
    A tap sounded on his
heavy wooden door just before someone pushed it open. His secretary stuck her
head in. “Got a minute, boss?”
    “Sure, Chloe. Come on
in.” He pulled his hand away from the telephone.
    His secretary was a
native of Crow’s Creek who had been hired along with most of the other staff
prior to the hotel’s opening. She had an associate’s degree from a nearby
college, was married, and had two children. Other than the fact that she always
came