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“Okay, dinner, but we’re not having pizza.” Her eyes flashed with humor, and he couldn’t help staring at them and thinking how beautiful they were, how beautiful she was.
“You’re on. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
She smiled as she walked out the door with the others. Unable to take his eyes off her, he watched her until they disappeared from view, then turned out the lights and locked up the coffee shop for another day.
CHAPTER12
The next morning, Roni woke early and called Brianna. “You up?”
“Of course,” Brianna said. “I’m just finishing up getting a cabin ready for new visitors. What’s up?”
“Do you have anything planned for today? I was thinking of driving to that vintage market in Fearrington Village. Do you want to join me?”
“Absolutely. I love that place. I could always use more Christmas decorations.”
Roni barked out a laugh. “You already have so many.”
“One can never have too many Christmas decorations.”
Annoyed at being woken up, Spooky stretched and walked across her chest. “I thought afterward, we could get lunch at that little tea shop down the street from the market.”
“This is sounding better and better. I can be at your place in an hour.”
“Perfect. See you then.” Roni hung up the phone, then looked at Spooky lying at her feet. “I’m going to go get Jimmy a Christmas surprise. What do you think about that?”
Spooky gave her a slow blink.
She grinned. “I think so too. Don’t worry. I’ll look for something for you too.”
An hour later, she was in the car with Brianna, driving to the next town over and the vintage market that was filled with antiques and a multitude of collectibles.
“So what exactly are we looking for?” Brianna asked.
“Jimmy said his dad used to come to the shop all the time when my grandmother ran it. He’d buy her molasses cookies that she sold in those little antique tins.”
“Oh yeah, I remember that,” Brianna said as she parked the car. “He was talking about them at dinner.”
They got out of the car and hurried inside, pulling their jackets tight against the cold. “Apparently, he loved the tins so much he saved them. Jimmy asked if I still made her cookies—”
“Which you don’t,” Brianna said.
“But I can. I used to when I took over the shop. I just stopped after a while, and people stopped asking for them. It’s actually kind of sad,” Roni admitted, thinking about how many of her grandmother’s traditions she’d stopped.
“Oh, look at these mirrors. I love these. They would look so cute in my cabins.” Brianna stepped into a booth filled with mirrors of all different shapes and sizes.
“How is your B&B business?”
“I hired a college student to help me with the marketing so I can focus on running the day-to-day operations. We’re doing so much better. She really is a gem.”
“That’s wonderful! Maybe I should give that a try.”
Brianna nodded. “Talk to her. I bet she could help you come up with some ideas to get more customers into your shop.”
They walked down one aisle after another, trying to stay focused on what they were looking for but couldn’t stop rummaging through all the fun items and throwing several into their cart.
“Here are the tins. Look, aren’t they charming?” Roni pointed to the square vintage red tins with old-fashioned images of Christmas gracing the front of each one. Roni bought all the tins the man had. She would fill them with her grandmother’s molasses cookies and sell them. Or maybe just display them on the walls since she didn’t know when she’d get more.
Either way, it would be a wonderful tribute to her grandmother and a practice she was sorry she’d stopped.
