No Ordinary Christmas: The Lennox Brothers Romantic Comedy Series

By Talia Hunter

Three things even worse than Christmas:

1. Returning to my hated home town.

2. Getting arrested.

3. Realizing the arresting officer is the boy I ran out on in high school.

 

Luke Penn may look spectacular in a cop's uniform, but I never wanted to see him again. He witnessed The Incident, otherwise known as the most embarrassing thing to happen to anyone ever. So as soon as I make it through my sister's Christmas wedding, I'll pack up my elf costume and catch the first sleigh out of town.

 

But when sparks fly between me and Luke, I'm forced to make an impossible choice.

Should I escape my cringe-worthy past?
Or take a chance on a Luke-alicious future?

 

No Ordinary Christmas is a stand-alone, second-chance, holiday novella you'll love!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talia Hunter
• Release date: Nov 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215567371

Book preview

Chapter One

Willow

The worst part about putting on an enormous pair of snow goggles was getting the strap caught on the points of my plastic elf ears.

The elf costume was cheesy. It was a short green dress with striped leggings, a hat, plastic ears, and pointy elf shoes. Honestly, I felt pretty silly wearing it, especially when the ears kept falling off. But the gimmick had been working for me. The customers who hired me to set up their Christmas events loved it when I showed up looking the part. Most of my online reviews mentioned my costume, and that was what counted.

I usually worked in Vegas. Now I was in San Dante, and though my home town was only a five-hour drive from Vegas, it couldn’t be more different. For starters, though I’d seen a few houses and stores decorated for Christmas, you couldn’t compare the decorations here to the ones I was paid to put up in Vegas. That would be like comparing bingo night at San Dante’s community center to high rollers’ night at the Bellagio, and at only one of those events were all the players still awake at the end.

This time of year in Vegas, I’d usually be run off my feet. But because my sister Holly was marrying a guy called Rudolph—and yeah, I’m not making that up—my sister just had to have a Christmas wedding. So, seeing as my business was fully mobile, and Holly had asked me to stay in San Dante for several days to have my bridesmaid dress fitted and attend a wedding rehearsal, I’d decided to bring everything with me and advertise my services in my home town.

Unfortunately, so far I’d only been able to get one job, and it was a weird one.

Tugging my elf hat firmly down, and with my snow goggles already fogging over, I nodded to the woman standing beside me on the sidewalk.

You’re sure about this, Mrs. Watson? I asked for the third time. I usually sprinkle snow over dance floors, or in front of wedding chapels. I don’t spray it at houses.

Mrs. Watson was a small woman, made slightly taller because her long gray hair was piled on top of her head and fastened with colorful barrettes. She’d been my English teacher back in high school and was what folks in the town of San Dante called eccentric, though people in other parts might not be so polite.

But seeing as I was barely five-foot-four, and a small bell was jangling on the end of my pointy elf hat, I couldn’t exactly accuse her of being either short or eccentric. Even if she was wearing bright pink overalls with sparkly sneakers.

Quite sure, Willow, Mrs. Watson said. And didn’t I tell you to call me Trixie?

Uh-huh, I said doubtfully. I might be twenty-nine, with school far behind me, but I hadn’t seen my old teacher since the day I left town and she’d always be Mrs. Watson to me.

I want snow all over the house, piled up on the porch, everywhere. She pointed to the small, neat house in front of us. It had wooden steps leading up to its wrap-around porch and had been built close enough to the street that I’d been able to park my snow machine right in front of it, in perfect firing range.

Snow will cover the steps, I pointed out. They’ll get slippery. And the snow will melt so fast, it won’t look good for long. It was chilly and the sky was overcast, but it was nowhere near freezing.

Mrs. Watson nodded enthusiastically. That’s exactly what I want. Snow the house in. She made shoving motions with both hands as though manually piling it on. Give me a mid-winter blizzard at the North Pole. Bury it twenty-foot deep!

It was an odd request, but Mrs. Watson’s weirdometer had always been stuck in the red. At school she used to dress up as a character from whichever book she was teaching. When my class read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she’d turned up wearing a donkey head made from moth-eaten fur stretched over a bent wire frame.

Twelve years later, I still had nightmares.

You’re really having a party? I asked.

My guests will be here any minute. Cover the house with snow now, so they get the full effect.

You’re the boss, I said with a shrug. Weird or not, the customer was always right, and Mrs. Watson had paid in advance.

Pulling on a thick pair of gloves, I clambered onto the snow machine attached behind my SUV, hiking up the skirt of my green elf-dress to straddle the machine. Bracing my green, pointy elf-shoes on either side, I took a moment to hitch up my red-striped leggings, then picked up the large hose.

For winter-wonderland weddings and parties, I set the snow machine to sprinkle a gentle, picturesque snowfall over a dance floor or stage. For Mrs. Watson, I’d use the snow cannon attachment to blast out three cubic feet of snow per second.

Turning the output dial all the way to eleven, I pressed the ignition to make the machine roar into life and braced myself. Then I hit the trigger with my foot.

The hose shuddered as snow came shooting out, and I hung on for dear life, using all my strength to aim the white torrent at the house in front of me.

My snow goggles instantly fogged over, so it was difficult to see the house. But squinting through the white haze, I could just make out the snow blasting the front windows and doors, and starting to pile in drifts on the porch.

Over the loud roar of the engine and the thump-thump-thump of snow hitting the house, I dimly heard Mrs. Watson cackling with delighted laughter.

And was that the sound of angry male shouts?

Bending my head, I tried to wipe the fog off my goggles with my upper arm, while keeping a tight grip on the vibrating canon. When I lifted my face, a small clear patch on the lens gave me a better look at the house.

The front door was… open?

Crap!

My heart flipped over as I hit the kill switch.

The deafening rumble from the machine cut out, and suddenly the angry male shouts were loud. So was Mrs. Watson’s laughter. She was bent over, hands on knees, cackling so hard I was amazed she wasn’t peeing in her pants.

You said nobody was in the house! I dropped the snow canon attachment and jumped off the machine. She was too busy laughing to answer, but the shouting coming from inside the front door told me she must have lied.

This was bad.

With the door wide open, the snow had blasted into the house. My insurance wouldn’t cover that kind of damage.

I ran up the steps, racing toward the door with vague ideas of shovelling out the snow and trying to mop up water residue before it ruined the floor. But as I sprang off the top step, my elf shoes slipped in the slush. My momentum carried me forward, turning me into a human cannonball. Limbs flailing, I flew through the door.

I hit a man, who let out a loud ‘Whompf," and went down with me on top of him. Snow was all around us, great mounds of it already melting on the hallway floor. We landed in a pile of it, but the landing still hurt.

Ouch, I said, pulling my head out of the man’s surprisingly nice-smelling armpit.

Then I stared up in horror, forgetting about the man I was lying on, because two other men were standing over me, gaping down.

One man was around my age, tall and muscle-bound. In spite of the long scar on his neck and another scar on his forearm, he was just as gorgeous as I remembered, though his shoulders had grown at least twice as wide since I last saw him. His name was Mason Lennox, and I knew him from my school days.

The other man was Mason’s father, Edward Lennox. I instantly recognized his impressive eyebrows. It should have been impossible for them to get even bushier in the years since I’d last seen him, but they were wilder than Einstein’s hair.

Edward’s face was red and he was spluttering as though trying to form words, but he seemed too shocked and enraged to get them out.

I had a horrible sinking realization.

This wasn’t Trixie Watson’s house.

It was Edward Lennox’s house.

It should have been against the laws of the universe for my old English teacher to lie to me. But judging from the hysterical laughter I could still hear from outside, she wasn’t even remorseful.

The woman who—I belatedly remembered—had given me a failing grade after an entire year’s hard work in her class, had tricked me. For some reason, she’d paid me to snow-bomb Edward’s house. And now here I was, an innocent elf in some serious trouble.

In the shock of seeing Mason Lennox and his father, I’d almost forgotten about the man I was lying on. Until he shifted under me, groaning and lifting his head.

What the hell? he demanded, his voice a deep, sexy rumble.

I found myself gazing into eyes that were almost, but not quite, the same color—one eye blue-green, and the other green-blue. They were ringed with dark, long lashes. But the man’s hard jaw and muscled shoulders negated the lashes, as though his maker had gone overboard with masculine features to make up for his pretty eyes.

My stomach somersaulted and thudded on the floor. I knew this man all too well.

I used to gaze adoringly at him in high school. Whenever