Page 57 of The Forever Christmas Tree

Does she think I’m like Steve Carell in that movie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and I don’t know what to do?

How embarrassing!

How adorable!

I could kill the old lady.

Or hug her.

Thus it was that he was smiling when he arrived at Gabe Conti’s house an hour later. And, yes, he was driving his Lexus, not the pickup truck, which he much preferred. Well, it wasn’t just his home situation that had him smiling, it was the whole transformation of the old Conti mansion and the stunned expression on Gabe’s face.

There were about twenty cars there already, parked on both sides of the semicircle driveway. He parked behind Karl Gustafson’s motorcycle. He could hear classical music coming from the open double front doors.

“Can you believe this?” Gabe asked, coming down the wide steps to greet him as he exited his vehicle.

They both stared up at the white lights that outlined every feature of the massive building, not to mention the single white candles that lit every single window. There were also live evergreen garlands around each window and door frame. Two twenty-foot Douglas firs, decorated with colored twinkling bulbs, could be seen through the large bay windows that framed both sides of the front door.

He wondered idly if he’d gotten that business.

“Let me guess? Laura?” Ethan said, biting his lip to restrain a smile.

“Yes! We’ve blown a fuse three times today, and I had to call in an electrician to install a new breaker. Time and a half.”

“Well, it looks nice.”

“Yeah, it does, but wait till you see the inside. She’s like a bulldozer when she wants something. A velvet bulldozer. By the time you realize what’s happened you’ve been flattened.”

“You can always say no.”

“Pfff! That’s a word Laura doesn’t recognize.”

“There must be some benefits to you.”

“There are,” he admitted with a sigh.

He thought Gabe was going to say friends with benefits, which just showed where his mind was.

But instead, Gabe said, “Laura has been very helpful in assessing all the junk in this house, what to toss out, what to sell, and what to keep. You have no idea what a mess it is.”

“A good mess or a bad mess?”

“Both, I suppose. The original house was built to accommodate the three brothers,” he said, pointing to the central part of the mansion with the two wings extending out on either side. “My great-great-great-grandparents, Salvadore and Angela Conti, lived in the middle, and the bachelor uncles, Lorenzo and Tomas, lived in their own separate wings. What I didn’t realize is that the uncles were collectors.”

“Of what?”

“Lorenzo wasn’t so bad. He collected pipes, the kind you smoke. Seven hundred and sixty-two. I would just toss them in the trash, but Laura says some of them are valuable. So, now I have to find someone who wants to buy them or sell them for me.”

“You could probably list them on eBay. Or maybe there’s a pipe museum you could donate them to and take a charitable tax deduction.”

“A pipe museum?” Gabe looked at him as if he was crazy.

Ethan shrugged. “I’ve heard of stranger things. Did you know there’s a condom museum in Canada?”

Gabe shook his head at Ethan’s sorry attempt at humor. “But that’s not the worst part. Tomas was interested in big game, not hunting them himself, but collecting the trophies. The walls are covered with elephant tusks and zebra heads and a tiger skin the size of a small house complete with head and paws, and there’s a ten-foot-tall gorilla guarding the fireplace. Half of them are probably endangered species . . . maybe not then, but surely today. If the news media finds out about this, my face will be plastered all over the place, like that doctor or dentist who killed an animal in Africa or somewhere, and ended up getting death threats.”

“Whoa! You started with being the Christmas Lights King and moved on to America’s Most Hated Man list. I thought you were supposed to be relaxing over the holiday.”

“Tell me about it!”