His protests faded as she sprinted from the diner and hopped on her bike, which was waiting outside for her. As she pedaled towards the massive mansion on the far side of town, speeding past Dickensian facades and garlands, Kate’s motives solidified. There was only one way to save Miller’s Point. There was only one way to save the festival. There was only one way to save the solitary man in the diner from his own self-imposed darkness and isolation.

She had to make Clark Woodward believe in Christmas.

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

It was so provincial. Clark Woodward couldn’t think of any other word to describe Miller’s Point. Provincial in every sense of the word. Nearly everything about them revealed how small they were, and what was worse, they reveled in their smallness. They clung to their superstitious belief in the holidays. They fought the inevitable march of progress he was going to bring to the company and their backwater enclave. The diner didn’t even have avocado on the menu.

As he waited for his pancakes, Clark opened the newspaper. They didn’t get the Dallas Observer out here, so the local gossip would have to do. He scanned the words, each one sinking in less deeply than the one before it. Out of the window framing his booth, he could see the entire town square, including the town hall, where only yesterday he and Kate—he never got her last name—had faced off.

Last night, he hadn’t allowed himself the time or the thought to take in the beauty of the town’s historic district. And it really was beautiful, even if it being beautiful just reminded him how wasteful the entire enterprise was. How much money did they spend on these facade recreations of London’s Cheapside? How much of his family’s fortune got washed away every night with those fake snow machines? And the lights! They might as well have built a fire out of all the greenbacks they wasted.

Wasteful and beautiful. The worst combination.

More dangerous, though, was thinking about the beauty who’d dared to challenge him. She’d burned herself into him yesterday with her persistence and the fiery passion behind her eyes.

He appreciated how strangely alike they were, even as they fought for completely different goals. If he hadn’t been spooked by her insistence that his uncle would have saved the festival, he could have stayed on those steps and talked to her for hours. She was a sharp debater with a biting wit. In a town like this, he’d expected to be greeted as a king. His family, after all, was responsible for their survival. But she didn’t bow and scrape; she challenged him.