"That's a very generous reframe."
"I'm a very generous person once you get to know me."
He doesn't look generous. Not in the way I think of generous. No fancy cigar or named brand clothes. Maybe when I hear generous I think wealthy. Nah, he looks like the type of person who says exactly what he means and does exactly what he says. Confident.
"Thank you," I say. "For all of it. Knowing what to do. Checking on me. Not yelling at me about your bumper."
"I'll see you at the resort, Maya Daniels."
The way he says my name does something to me that I can’t put my finger on. All I know is, I really like the way it sounds coming from his lips.
His truck pulls out ahead of mine and I sit for a full thirty seconds before I trust myself to drive.
I pick up my phone before I pull onto the road.
Me: HOLLY, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY LIFE!
HOLLY: You're welcome.
CHAPTER 2
Holly said it was aluxury resort.
Holly said ski slopes and Christmas theme and upscale.
Holly did not adequately prepare me for this.
I blame Holly for being fully unprepared. She should have sent me a video, pictures… something.
The Evergreen unfolds across the mountain like somebody whispered a very expensive wish into the snow and the mountain grew it exactly to their specifications. Stone, timber and glass, all of it enormous and somehow still feels intimate, framed against peaks so white and perfect they look borrowed from a film set. The entrance archway alone is cathedral height, strung with thousands of warm white lights and fresh pine boughs wound with gold ribbon and oversized crimson ornaments that catch the fading afternoon sun. I always loved the way gold and crimson looked together.
There is real snow on the ground. Mountain snow, not the decorative kind. As I get closer, I smell woodsmoke from the fireplaces, mingling in with the pine from the thick woods and something baking with hints of cinnamon.
A valet appears before I've fully registered that valets are a thing that happens here. I startle briefly before I get my bearings.
"Ms. Daniels? Holly's been expecting you." My bags are in his hands before I've agreed to any of this. "She asked me to bring you directly to the atrium."
"Of — yes, of course, thank you." I look up at the archway. "Is it always lit like this?"
"Exterior lighting runs four PM through midnight, ma'am. A different theme each week through December."
I need to live here.
I take seventeen photos before I make it through the front doors. I’m not being excessive, I tell myself. I’m doing my job.
The interior is worse. Better. Worse-better.
The atrium is three stories of glass and timber, and the Christmas tree in the center has to be thirty feet tall. It’s a real tree, I think, or extremely committed to the bit of looking real, and decorated in deep green and antique gold and ivory, with ornaments that look individually handmade. There are fireplaces. Plural. Real wood burning fireplaces, not the gas kind. Neatly stacked wood sits to the side, somehow giving the room a bit of a rustic appeal.
There's soft orchestral Christmas music coming from somewhere I can't locate, and the air has that specific expensive-hotel smell that I have always privately wanted to bottle and take home with me.
And then Holly hits me like a very small, very enthusiastic freight train.
"You're here!" She's hugging me before I've finished seeing her. "You're actually here and you're alive and you're not dead on a mountain road —"
"I was never going to die on a mountain road."
"You rear-ended a wildlife vet!"
