Page 104 of Falling for the Grinchy Bad Boy

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JOY

The choir was missing three music stands, the donkey for the live nativity had apparently developed stage fright, and Mrs. Hamlin was in full panic mode because her gingerbread house booth looked too rustic. Never mind she was the one that set up the damn booth.

This was so much more stressful than I had anticipated.

Did I really want to do this? Christmas was going to kill me. Could I do this for every holiday? I honestly wasn’t sure I had the fortitude to handle nerves like these. I knew Christmas had its own unique level of stress. Maybe it wasn’t so bad the rest of the holidays. Fourth of July. Maybe a Memorial Day festival. It couldn’t all be this tense, right?

I stood in the middle of the Christmas market grounds with my clipboard clutched in one hand and my phone in the other, trying to juggle seventeen different conversations while mentally calculating whether I had enough time to solve everyone’s problems before the market opened at six.

I did not.

“Joy, the sound system for the choir is crackling,” Tom called from the makeshift stage we had erected near the center of the square.

“Joy, where do you want the backup generator?” shouted Mike, who was helping with the electrical setup in his off-duty time.

“Joy, the cotton candy machine isn’t spinning properly,” complained another vendor from her confectionery booth.

I closed my eyes for exactly three seconds—all the time I could spare for a mini breakdown—then opened them and got back to work.

“Tom, there’s a backup sound system in the storage room at city hall,” I called back. “I had someone put the generator behind the information booth where it won’t be in anyone’s way.

There’s a wrench in the tool kit under the registration table.”

This was exactly why I’d been avoiding Cooper earlier when I had seen him across the market grounds. Not because I didn’t want to see him—God, I wanted nothing more than to run into his arms and let him hold me while I had a proper nervous breakdown—but because we needed to have a long talk, and there was absolutely no time for that right now.

I couldn’t afford the distraction. Not when I was this close to the finish line.

Plus, I couldn’t get Lynn’s words out of my head. That woman had messed me up. I couldn’t stop thinking about what she said.

It was making me question everything I had been so comfortable believing. It made me second-guess everything I thought I knew about myself, including this. What if I totally screwed up and bombed the whole damn thing? These vendors counted on the earnings from the market to buy their Christmas gifts. They needed it to support their families. If I messed things up, it would cost them so much more than just a bad day. I had to get this right.

The Christmas market was opening tonight and would run every evening through December twenty-third. If everything went smoothly, if the crowds came and the vendors were happy and the whole event was the success I had envisioned, then maybe I would have a real shot at the tourism coordinator position with the city.

That job was my ticket to staying in Calton Hill permanently. It was the practical foundation that would let me build a life here, the career that would make staying a smart decision instead of just a romantic one.

I needed to keep my eye on the prize, no matter how much my heart was aching.

Lynn’s words from yesterday kept echoing in my mind. You’re just a rebound. I’m the real deal.

Was she right? Was I fooling myself about what Cooper felt for me? Would he always love her more than he could ever love me? He had asked her to marry him, after all.

That was not nothing.

He loved her. He loved her enough to ask her to spend the rest of his life with him. We had sex a few times. I spent the night and left in the morning. I didn’t even think we could call what we were doing dating.

Was I just the person he was using to get back in the saddle?

The questions made my stomach churn, but I forced them down. All of those problems would have to wait until later. Right now, I had a Christmas market to launch.

“Joy!” Another vendor waved me over frantically. “My cash box is missing!”

“Did you check under your table?” I asked, hurrying toward her. “Sometimes the wind blows things around.”

As I helped her search for her wayward cash box—which we found wedged behind a display of handmade scarves—I noticed a case of bottled water sitting directly in the main footpath between two vendor booths. Someone had obviously set it down and forgotten about it, and it was positioned perfectly to send an unsuspecting festival-goer sprawling.

Cooper would be so proud, I thought automatically as I went to move the case to a safer location. I had internalized his safety consciousness so completely that I was seeing potential hazards everywhere.