Good Elf Gone Wrong: A Holiday Romantic Comedy

“Where’s this famous truck?” James asked snidely as we all headed out the front door.

Gracie opened her mouth.

I grabbed her hand.

“I lent it to a friend,” I lied smoothly, before Gracie could dig this hole any deeper. She was killing me. The truck thing was a disaster.

“Dude, what the fuck?” Grayson had said when I gave him my request as soon as Gracie had left the café earlier that day, loaded down with enough coffee to send a giraffe into cardiac arrest.

“This does not sound like someone who has the situation under control.”

“I could just buy a similar pickup truck and paint it.”

“I don’t want to leave anything to chance. I have no problem paying for quality. You cannot fuck this up. I’ll have my secretary work on it.”

James gave me a smarmy little smirk.

It rankled.

I hated guys like James, soft guys who had never suffered, never worked a day in their life, and thought their fancy college degree made them better than the rest of us.

“I can’t wait to see this fancy truck.”

Dammit. Usually I wasn’t one to wish I was a billionaire. The little I spent around Grayson and other billionaire clients, it seemed like more money, more problems. However, there were times when I wished I had enough money to wave a magic wand and make anything I desired appear. Because what I wanted most in the world at that moment was to have that mythical green truck, just to wipe the knowing smirks off the faces of James and Gracie’s other family members.

They don’t believe her, and they don’t believe me.

“F-150s are expensive,” Gracie’s uncle said, rocking on his heels. “Maybe it’s a different truck and Gracie was mistaken.”

“No, she was correct. You know us Marines,” I said, leveling my gaze at him. “We make terrible financial decisions when it comes to cars.”

“You and Hudson can ride with your father and me in the minivan,” Bethany said to her daughter.

“It will give us a chance to get to know each other better,” Rob said jovially, punching me lightly on the bicep then scurrying back when he realized what he’d done.

James gave me another greasy smile and circled his arm around Kelly, who snuggled against him.

If Gracie didn’t seem like she was about to jump out of her own skin, I would have staked my claim over her in front of her ex.

As it was, she was fidgeting nervously with the ties on her dark-red coat. Pugnog was picking up on her anxiety, and he whined at her feet.

She scooped up the dog. He was wearing a ridiculous red-and-green sweater with a stoned-looking reindeer knitted on it.

“Aw. You and Hudson will be just like teenagers, Gracie,” Kelly said as James pushed a button on his key ring. A white Range Rover flashed its lights.

“You can sit in the back with me, Hudson,” Granny Murray stated. “Gracie gets carsick, so she needs to sit in front.”

There is money at the end of this rainbow of shit, I reminded myself.

As I was about to climb into the minivan after Gracie’s brother, a horn blared, and a dark-green pickup truck barreled down the road.

“Whoa!” one of Gracie’s younger cousins yelled as the pickup screeched to a halt in front of the mailbox.

A man I’d never seen before parked in front of Gracie’s parents’ house and saluted me as he exited from the cab.

“Thanks for letting me borrow your truck, Hudson,” he said, loping over, keys in his outstretched palm.

“No problem, man,” I said, easily falling into the lie. “Any time.”

“Your chainsaws in the back. I gassed it up,” he added, taking my hand and slapping me on the back.

“Grayson says Merry Christmas, asshole,” he whispered in my ear as he crushed my hand. “And stop fucking up.”

I practically dragged Gracie out of the front seat of the minivan.

“We’ll meet you guys at the Christmas tree farm,” I told her parents.

Gracie was grinning ear to ear as I ushered her to the truck. Pugnog wagged his curled tail happily.

“Stop smiling. You look like you’re having an aneurysm,” I hissed in her ear.

“Nice truck.” Her uncles whistled appreciatively.

James looked like he was going to spit blood. “It’s all scratched up,” he said.

“Yeah,” I told him, “because I actually use it to haul shit.”

“Now we’re hauling Christmas trees,” Gracie’s mom said brightly.

I opened the truck door for Gracie.

“I mean it about the smiling,” I warned her.

But she was still grinning when I climbed into the truck next to her.

“I’m just so impressed you found this.” She beamed at me. “You’re happy this truck is here.”

“No, I’m not. I knew it was going to get here. I called in a favor from a friend.”

“You opened the door for me,” she said, pleased. “You were so happy about getting the truck that you forgot to be an asshole. I think it’s adorable. You’re like a kid on Christmas.”

“You know what your problem is?” I told her as I started the car. “You have low standards.”

“And your problem is that you are not in touch with your emotions.” She fiddled with the radio, and Christmas tunes blared out from the speakers. Gracie sang along as we drove into the snowy countryside.

“You’re not singing.”

“I hate Christmas music.”

“Do you hate Christmas snacks? You sound hungry.” She pulled a container of peppermint bark out of her purse. “I have Christmas trail mix, too, and dog treats, of course,” she cooed to Pugnog.

I waved away her offer of food.

“I’m trying to steel myself for the coming trial.”

“You’re so dramatic. It’s Christmas-tree cutting.”

“I’d rather be tortured,” I retorted as I pulled up next to James’s white Range Rover at the Christmas tree farm.

My heart skipped as a memory surfaced: my mother, drunk as usual, taking us to find our Christmas tree while her latest boyfriend yelled at us that he was leaving in exactly twenty minutes, and anyone who wasn’t in the car wasn’t making it home.

This isn’t your family, I reminded myself as I slammed the car door.

Pugnog was racing around in circles in the snow while Gracie gazed around, enchanted by the winter wonderland surrounding us.

I grabbed the chainsaw out of the back of my truck and lifted it on my shoulder.

“We like to cut down our trees by hand,” James called to me, holding up a dull hacksaw. “It’s more fun that way.” He waved the saw at me. “You get to do the honors.”

I took it with a disgusted noise.

Gracie pulled an overstuffed white notebook out of her bag and walked around, inspecting the Christmas trees carefully like she was a fancy art curator, not some girl looking for a Christmas tree.

Elsa would like her, I thought then killed it. Gracie wasn’t my girlfriend. She wasn’t meeting my family.

It’s one tree. Cut it down and get the fuck out of there.

“Which tree do you want?” I asked her as she wandered dreamily through the neat rows of snow-covered Christmas trees.

If I wasn’t there to ruin her family’s life, I would have called the scene romantic.

“This one’s beautiful, I think,” she breathed, looking up in wonder at the huge fir.

I knelt down beside the tree.

“And this one,” she said, spreading her arms in front of another large tree.

I stood up and hefted the handsaw.

“Let’s take this one,” Gracie said, flitting to yet another tree.

“Just pick one,” I barked.

Gracie popped her head around a tree. “No, we need all of them.”

“What the—”

“They’re for Kelly’s engagement party and wedding at the Canning Factory. It’s that old historic warehouse that was converted into a wedding venue,” she explained. “Do you know it? The space is huge, so I need a lot of trees.”

Knew it? I owned it.

Like I said, I couldn’t seem to quit Maplewood Falls.

“I’m not cutting down all these trees by hand,” I forced out.

“But it’s part of the experience,” Gracie protested. “We always cut trees by hand, and everyone takes a turn.”

I ignored her and thrust the handsaw at James.

“I’ll cut it by hand,” he promised Gracie. “I like doing things the traditional way.”

“Whatever.” I jump-started the chainsaw, and it came to life with a roar. “Point to the ones you want,” I yelled at Gracie over the noise.

I made quick work of the trees as she pointed them out to me while keeping Pugnog out of the way as the Christmas trees came crashing down one by one.

By the time twenty huge firs were lying on the ground, James was still working the dull saw through the first tree Gracie had asked for.

“Move,” I ordered.

“I almost got it.” James was red-faced and sweating.

The saw was stuck in the pinesap and barely moving.

“Just give up, James,” Kelly said to him. She fluttered her eyelashes at me. “Let the man work.”

“Give me the chainsaw then,” James demanded.

“Fuck no.”

I kicked away the stuck handsaw with my steel-toed boot then let the chainsaw chew through the trunk. I killed the power on the chainsaw and hefted the Christmas tree over my shoulder, cutting a path through the trees back to my truck.

“You don’t have to have such a bad attitude,” Gracie said to me, finally showing some backbone, though I wished it would be about anything other than those fucking Christmas trees.

“There are other families here, and they don’t want the sound of a chainsaw ruining their Christmas tree hunting.”

I unhooked the back panel of the pickup truck so I could toss the tree and the chainsaw in the truck bed. Then I grabbed Gracie by the upper arm.

“What part,” I snarled softly, “of ‘I am not your boyfriend’ don’t you understand? I’m not here to be another little stuffed dog in your collection. I’m here to fuck your sister, blow up her wedding, and move on.”

Gracie reacted like I’d slapped her.

“You’re delusional if you think that I’m ever going to develop real feelings for you. I will never care about you enough to hand cut twenty fucking Christmas trees.”

“I have a feeling,” she said, eyes flashing, “that even if you had a real girlfriend, you’d still treat her like shit.”

“Damn right.” I grabbed her hand, her smaller one clenched in mine as I tugged her back to the rows of trees.

“Act like you like me,” I ordered her, pulling her closer to my body.

“I don’t. I can’t stand you.”

“Trust me, the feeling is mutual.”

Bethany was tut-tutting as James and Rob struggled to drag one of the Christmas trees to the Range Rover.

I hope he gets sap all over the finish of the car, I though savagely as I hefted two Christmas trees, one over each shoulder, and made my way back to the truck.

I remembered how my mom had complained bitterly the very last time we’d had a Christmas tree that the sap had ruined the carpet. Never mind that she was forever dropping cigarettes on it and burning black holes in the expensive wool.

As I threw the last of the Christmas trees on the large pile in the bed of the pickup, I noticed James struggling to single-handedly carry a smaller tree to his Range Rover.

I wordlessly grabbed it from him.

“I have it.”

“No, you don’t.”

Kelly giggled. I winked at her.

Gracie was trying to get her father to drink some water from where he was leaning on the side of the minivan. She glanced up.

“James, just let Hudson help. You’ll ruin your back.”

Bitter acid burned the back of my throat.

She can’t still care about him.

So what if she did? I didn’t want Gracie to care about me. Some insipid Christmas-loving woman who runs back to her cheating ex at a moment’s notice is not the type of person a man should desire.