“Okay, well, in that case, it’s exactly how you’d imagine it.” She stopped at the door entrance. “Wait a minute. Maybe you should go through the door first so the branches won’t get caught. The shop’s closed but the door isn’t locked yet.”
After a person passed them on the sidewalk, Mason moved his side of the tree past Natalie’s end and pushed the door open with a hip. They were able to slide the tree inside with minimum needle loss. Some of the tables had been rearranged and there was a tree stand in the corner of the shop. He put the trunk into the stand on the ground, tightening the screws as she held the tree upright. “Can you bring some water in a pitcher or something? I might as well add it while I’m down here,” he said.
She handed him a pitcher already filled.
“Just make sure to keep this full. That’ll keep your tree fresher longer and you won’t get as many dry needles falling off. If you let the stand go empty the water uptake of the tree stops, so even if you put in more water, the trunk won’t take it in. That’s when it starts to dry out.”
With his task done, Mason stood, finding Natalie beside the tree, her eyes closed and her expression completely serene. She didn’t appear at all like a fairy-tale villain in the making.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
Those beautiful eyes opened with all the brilliance of a sunrise. He was instantly warmed by her gaze. “Yes. I-I was just smelling it.”
With his job done, he should leave, but he didn’t want to. “Do you want help decorating?”
“Oh, no, you don’t have to do that. I can manage. You’ve already gone out of your way to deliver the thing and you probably want to get out of here. I’m not that much of a villain.”
“I don’t have anything going on right now and maybe if Prince Charmings offered their services to villains more often, there’d be a lot more friendships between them.”
“Okay, well, it’s actually not very much.” She went behind the coffee counter and soon returned with a cardboard box, much smaller than one expected to hold Christmas ornaments. His own mother had two giant Tupperware storage containers that she made him lug down from the attic every year.
“Is there another one?” he asked.
Her gaze dropped to the box in her hand. “Uh, no, this is it. I haven’t gone shopping for new ornaments since we had a small tree two years ago and even then I just grabbed a few generic boxes from Dollar Tree. I don’t like to invest a lot of time in setting this stuff up, and I do it alone. I just want to get it over with so I can go home.”
Natalie set the box on the table before removing her jacket and pulling her hair tight into a ponytail. She took off the lid and removed two strings of basic white lights and a few boxes of solid red ball ornaments. She wasn’t exaggerating about the basicness of her holiday decoration.
He decided not to say anything further about it. “You want to start with the lights?”
She untangled them before handing them over. “Do you have other vendors that are going to be on the farm?”
“Yup. We have a waffle vendor, a hot dog/fair food vendor. And, of course, your truck. This year we wanted to make it a whole family-destination thing. Plus, we have a craft vendor coming. Kids, or even adults, will be allowed to paint their own ornament to take home. That might be of interest to you. And, there’s the Poinsettia Paradise Marketplace where we sell poinsettias, handmade local crafts, and some of my honey.”
“You make honey?”
“I didn’t make it. The bees do. It’s called, ‘It’s the Motherlode, Honey!’” and he said this last part with the exaggerated accent of an old prospector discovering gold.
A smile flashed across her face while she handed him the next section of lights. It was like he caught sight of a shooting star. Her smile was large, and creases created soft brackets around her mouth, making him feel as if he’d hit a jackpot. He didn’t mind appearing as ridiculous as possible if it meant experiencing her joy again.
“I’ve always wondered what happens to bees when the weather gets cold. Do they migrate like birds? And how do they remember which beehive to return to when they get back?”
“They don’t migrate. They stay inside the hive all winter.”
Her expression reflected surprise. “They do?”
“Yup. When you’re out at the farm, I’ll show you my hive boxes sometime. They’re out past the greenhouse. Basically, they cluster around the queen and survive by eating honey. They create their own heat by vibrating their flight muscles. It can get to a toasty ninety degrees inside the hive.”
She viewed him skeptically. “Are you putting me on? They’re just inside the box vibrating?”
“What? You don’t think if we started vibrating next to each other that wouldn’t generate some heat?” He meant for this to come out sounding more scientific but, of course, it didn’t . “Oh…I, uh, didn’t mean to make that creepy. What I meant was…” Mason didn’t have an actual answer because he wasn’t sure what he’d meant.
He relaxed when Natalie laughed in response. “If you have to explain it, it’s no longer funny, Prince.”
Regardless, his ears grew warm. His thoughts about her at this moment certainly didn’t make him a prince.
“It seems a little silly to have this large, beautiful tree and then have these cheap ornaments on it,” she said after the last ornament was placed. The ratio of tree to ornaments was sadly off. She stared at their work with a frown on her face. “It’s okay for a fake tree but not a tree this nice. This is exactly why I didn’t want a real one. Now I’m going to have to stare at it like this for the rest of the year.”
“Or you could buy more ornaments.”
