“No? Come on. It had to be one of you. Sent to the post office in North Pole, Alaska first, to get the postmark?”
“Honey,” her mom said, “you might just have to accept that you’ll never find out how it got to you.”
But Noelle swung around and pointed at the guy who he was pretty sure was married to Noelle’s sister, Hope. “None of you are lying, right? Cory. You helped a lot in cleaning out Gran-gran’s painting room. It was you, wasn’t it?”
Cory held up both hands. “Noelle, I swear to you, if it had been me who had found a box she left with your name on it, I would’ve just handed it to you back in January when we cleaned everything—I wouldn’t have gone to the work of saving it for all these months and then shipping it to the North Pole first.”
“Yeah, you totally would’ve. It was no one? Really?” Noelle sighed.
“It sounds like the verdict is in,” Noelle’s dad said, grinning as he looked around the room at everyone. “It’s a Christmas miracle.”
Everyone laughed, but Jack didn’t quite understand why.
Noelle leaned into Jack. “Every Christmas season, my dad declares at least one thing—but sometimes up to a dozen things—a ‘Christmas miracle.’ It has pretty much become its own tradition now.”
“All right,” Katie said, clapping her hands together, “now that that’s settled, who wants to be interviewed for our annual Christmas Eve video?”
One of Noelle’s brothers-in-law raised his hand, and Noelle nodded toward the kitchen counter. “Want to help me fill icing bags?”
He nodded and followed her through the crowd of people, who had all gone back to doing whatever jobs they had been doing before they paused for introductions. Noelle lifted a big mixing bowl from the stand, placed it on the counter, and thenused a rubber spatula to scrape around the edges. Then she pulled toward them a stack of triangular-shaped bags that he could only guess were made of silicone and lifted the top one from the pile.
“We just need to drop in one of the tips and make sure it’s in the spot at the bottom just right, then we’ll fill them maybe half full. Do you want to hold or fill?”
“Hold.” Definitely. He didn’t have a clue what they were doing.
So he held the bag open as she scooped a bunch of the frosting onto the rubber spatula and put it into the bag, kind of wiping it off against the edge of the bag. Then she went for a second scoop.
It was awkward work, and it required them to stand close enough that the sides of their bodies were touching, their arms trying to occupy the same space. He kept things very professional at work, so there had never been a situation where he’d been this close to her before, and he found her presence intoxicating.
She took the bag from him and moved her hands around the outside, probably trying to get the frosting in the right place, then twisted the top and added a clip to it. He picked up the next bag and put the icing tip into it, just like she’d shown him.
“How is Rachel doing?”
He looked over to meet her eyes, which were definitely green and not hazel. This close, he could see the facets in her eyes and the darker rim around the outside that was almost a navy blue. He’d always thought that her eyes were bewitching, but they were even more so when he was this close.
“She’s doing okay. Much better than she was Saturday night or even yesterday.” It had touched him that she had sought him out at work this morning to ask how she was doing after her hospital visit.
“That’s good to hear. You must be worried about her all the time. I bet that’s stressful.”
It was. No one had ever really acknowledged that before. He hadn’t even really acknowledged that stress—he’d only ever thought about the worry he had.
They continued to work, filling bags. On one, he must not have been paying enough attention to the bag because one side folded in just as Noelle was putting the icing in, getting it on the part of the bag that was supposed to be on the outside. They both jerked forward to fix it, and the rubber spatula got knocked out of Noelle’s hand, which they both tried to catch. They managed to keep it from falling to the counter or the floor, but icing got on his hand, her arm, and a bit had taken to the air and landed on Noelle’s cheek.
Noelle laughed and reached for a roll of paper towels, and he found himself chuckling. She pulled one off the roll and handed it to him. He cleaned off his hand, then got a second paper towel and said, “Here, let me get the part on your cheek.”
He found himself holding his breath as he wiped the frosting from her skin, his face just inches from hers. And she seemed to be holding her breath, too, as whatever this was passed between them. A heat. A spark. A connection. Something. And he knew it wasn’t just him who was feeling it.
He dropped his hand and set the paper towel on the counter as she cleared her throat and turned back to the icing bags.
All of the adults who weren’t currently holding a child in their arms helped to get all the correct gingerbread pieces placed at each spot at the table, with the icing and candy for decorating spread evenly throughout. Then everyone started finding seats around the table. Jack and Noelle found a spot with Aiden right between them.
It was a bit overwhelming seeing so many family members around the big table. He was pretty sure his parents each had asibling or two, but honestly, they had never talked about them. Neither of his parents had grown up with close families. It had only been the four of them until he was fifteen, and then it was just him and Rachel until Aiden was born. Aiden’s father had never even been in the picture. So all of this? It was a little too much.
“I don’t get how this makes a train car,” Aiden said, holding up two rectangle pieces of gingerbread. “There aren’t even any wheels.”
“See that table over there?” Noelle pointed at a large side table against the far wall with a Christmas village set up. “There’s a train track that goes all around it. The wheels are over there—what we’re making looks kind of like a box. We’ll put our gingerbread train cars on top of the wheels over there, and then the train can actually go around the track.”
“Cool! And does this gingerbread man go inside it?”
