Page 22 of A Mustang River Christmas

“Oh, just a hunch. Why don’t you go get caffeinated, have a shower, get dressed. I’ll make us a game plan for today. I’m pretty good at pacing out projects like this. And once we get all the elements together, we can certainly enlist some of the rest of the kitchen staff to help assemble.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m trusting you.”

“I won’t make you regret it.”

He got to work in the kitchen, making detailed notes, plotting out time, looking at all of the ingredients they had, gaining inspiration for how he wanted to execute this.

Adrenaline flowed through his system, his brain feeling on fire.

Pencil behind his ear, sleeves rolled up, he felt like himself. Like a version of himself that he had left behind so long ago he didn’t even think the guy had existed anymore.

He thought he’d killed that version of himself. Dead after that crash, destroyed by addiction. But here he was. Invested in this gingerbread house like it was the most important thing he’d ever done.

And loving it.

He liked being a cowboy. He enjoyed ranch work. But this was his passion, and it always would be.

The kitchen made him come alive. The creativity of dessert brought him alive.

By the time Laney came into the kitchen, he was ready to get started.

“We need to start on the shingles. And paneling. Here’s my list of all the pieces we need and all the dimensions. So this is how much we’re going to need to make.”

She looked up at him. “Yes, Chef.”

Oh, he liked that. He liked it a lot.

It had been a good while since anyone had said that to him in any context, but he especially liked this one.

His blood felt like it was running just a little bit hotter, and he felt like a different, better version of himself.

An interesting departure from feeling like a worse, disappointing version of himself.

They worked together as a seamless team, and got everything made perfectly and quickly. They knocked out his checklist right on schedule, and then they went to work setting everything out in front of the wooden structure they had waiting to be decorated.

They had ladders out, because they wouldn’t be able to reach the top without help, and he worked at making a system for the different pieces of cookie, candy, for the piping bags in different colors, for the isomalt sugar windows. Something about seeing it all laid out, ready to go before it was ever put on gave him a thrill.

And he could see that she felt it too.

He had never been one for dating people in the kitchen, so he hadn’t had the experience of sharing this passion with another person. Not when they were also sharing a different kind of passion, and he could see how it would be addicting.

They worked tirelessly, and guests stopped to watch as they focused in on their project.

Plotting and planning every element was one of his favorite parts. They had panels of gingerbread for the exterior walls, pirouette cookies for support beams. There were chocolate covered espresso beans acting as river rock and green sour belts cut up to make garlands and wreaths. Then there were the holiday elements — marshmallows for snowbanks, rock candy icicles, giant waffle cones he’d made from scratch which would be placed upside down and covered with piped green icing to act as Christmas trees, which would be decorated by gumdrops and red cinnamon candy.

They had pretzel stick firewood, red and green M&Ms to tuck along the roofline to act as Christmas lights.

He’d rigged up some interior lighting so that the whole structure glowed through those isomalt sugar windows.

Yeah, he loved the planning.

But he also loved this part of it, and he’d forgotten.

He had spent years doing things like this in the lobby at the hotel he worked at in Wyoming, and he had always enjoyed it. Had always enjoyed how magical all of this felt to their visitors.

It gave him a sense of wonder that he’d never had. Not until he’d had Chloe, anyway. His life had been difficult. His relationship with his parents wasn’t close, and he’d never had beautiful Christmases.

And then he’d gone and fucked it up. He was trauma for his own child, and that was something he’d never wanted to be. He’d had wonder, he’d tasted it, and he’d messed it up.