Secret Santa (9 page)

“That’s great.” Paige was so excited for her
that Kenna couldn’t help but smile. She stepped forward and
scratched the forehead of the large horse.

“Actually, I'm glad I ran into someone from
the town. Can you tell me a good place to stay? I couldn’t find any
hotels online.”

“That’s because there aren’t any. You’ll
want to go see Miss Lily Rae Rose. She has a bed and breakfast.
Just continue straight and make a left at the first stop light you
come to. She’s in the big white Victorian. And, if you’re looking
for a good place to eat, Miss Lily has two sisters, Miss Daisy Mae
Rose and Miss Violet Fae Rose, who run the Blossom Cafe. Great
place to eat some chocolate after a close call like this!” Paige
laughed and Kenna couldn’t help but like her. This was a woman
after her own heart!

“Thanks a lot. I'm guessing you're from
Keeneston. What do you do there?”

"I have a store on Main Street named
Southern Charms. I have all local made products. Everything from
statues, paintings, jewelry, clothes, painted wine glasses, to
cookbooks.”

“Sounds amazing. I'll have to stop by.”

“We should have lunch together. I can be the
official welcoming party!” They both turned to the sounds of a
diesel engine and saw a massive truck with a horse trailer come
around the corner from the direction Paige had come. “Ah, good. Now
we can get this boy home.”

Kenna stood back as three men jumped down
from the truck and with an apple helped convince the horse to get
in the trailer.

“Thanks for the help with him. I look
forward to our lunch. It was great meeting you and welcome to
Keeneston,” Paige said as she and Kenna walked to their cars.

Kenna’s legs had finally stopped shaking
when she slid into her car. Pulling out after Paige, she headed
into town, wondering what her new home would be like.

* * *

"Just shoot me now," Kenna thought as she
squeezed her eyes closed. She slowly opened them, hoping against
all odds the scene before her had changed, but to her utter
despair, it was the same scene she had just driven upon. Kenna had
pulled her M6 to the side of the road and stared at the town before
her with a critical eye. She was sitting on the edge of Main Street
and could see the other end of what she guessed to be downtown just
two stop lights away. The town was straight out of Mayberry, she
thought. She couldn’t help but start whistling the theme song to
the Andy Griffith Show as she looked around her new hometown:
perfect trees lining both sides of Main Street, American flags
waving from every light post, and the people wandering down the
sidewalk seemed to know each other since they were tipping their
hats and smiling to each person they passed by.

Kenna had spent the last eleven years in the
Big City. So when she took a deep breath that lacked pollution and
listened to the honking of cars that were strangely not honks of
anger, but honks of greeting as they passed someone they knew, she
felt out of her element. Not for the first time, Kenna wondered how
she ended up here. Just a month ago, she was at the hottest
nightclub in New York City with her best friend Danielle,
celebrating her twenty-ninth birthday with all her friends from
Greendale, Thompson and Hitchem, the largest law firm in New York.
Kenna sighed wistfully as she thought about the six figure salary,
the hot clubs and a condo in the Upper East Side of Manhattan that
she had left behind in a hurry.

With her eyes closed and her mind firmly set
in what might have been, Kenna thought about how she had dined with
professional athletes and actors at the best restaurants on the
company dime since they were clients. Standing only five foot four,
but blessed with what she called womanly curves, Kenna had not only
wined and dined famous people, but had dated and been pursued by
some as well. Kenna’s auburn hair, milky skin and dark green eyes
that hid an intelligence and sharp wit had made her sought after
inside and outside of the courtroom.

Kenna continued her trip down memory lane by
giving herself a moment to gloat. She had just made junior partner,
one of the youngest associates to have ever done so and the only
woman to ever do so.

She cringed as she remembered the night it
all changed. The night she fled from her six figure salary and left
her amazing condo. She had fled from New York City with her
ex-boyfriend hot in pursuit of her. Kenna fought a shiver as she
remembered Chad trying to find her to prevent her from leaving not
only the city but most likely her beautiful condo ever again. It
was in the early morning hours of the city that never sleeps that
Kenna found herself running for her life and looking for a place to
hide. She had sat in her car and thought about what always made her
feel better - chocolate. She had suffered a chocolate craving to
end all other chocolate cravings that night.

Now sitting in her car in Keeneston, she
remembered the shivers of fear that had wracked her body and the
feel of the cold bite of the February wind. And all she wanted was
chocolate. That’s when the idea hit her, the perfect place to hide
and the perfect place to indulge in the mother of all chocolate
cravings. She had turned her car towards the interstate and headed
to Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Kenna’s lips twitched. She had been right.
Since he had no idea where she was, she was left alone. And in
turn, Kenna was surrounded by chocolate for a month. The second
night she spent in Hershey, Kenna knew it was time to develop a
plan for the rest of her life, or at least for the next phase of
her life. Even though she was tempted to apply for the taster’s job
opening at the Hershey plant, she decided she couldn’t waste the
law degree her parents’ death had paid for. They died when a
drunken truck driver jackknifed his semi-truck on a patch of ice,
leaving no place for her parents' car to go. The trust they
established for Kenna was more than enough to pay for her
attendance at law school, and she even had a good part of it left
to be able to live off of if she wanted. However, after her
parents’ death, Kenna had lost the carefree ways that the life of
privilege provided and had gone to law school to learn how to put
away drunk drivers for the pain they caused innocent families.

Kenna sat on her bed in the extend-a-stay
hotel with the smell of chocolate in the air and started looking
for a job. She started with Alabama and worked her way through the
states alphabetically, looking for places that were hiring. She
kept an eye out for cities that were small but not isolated, cities
that Chad the Bastard wouldn’t think of looking for her. But most
importantly, cites that were looking for prosecutors. One week
later Kenna pumped her fists in the air and jumped up and down on
the bed when she saw the opening for a prosecutor seventeen states
later. Not too big, not too small… just right.

It was a good thing she had found the
opening when she did, Kenna thought to herself. She couldn’t put on
any more weight after spending a month in Chocolate Heaven. She
pushed the thoughts of the past back in her mind and opened her
eyes again. Mayberry was still there. When she was in Hershey the
week before, waiting to hear back about an interview, a memory
floated up to the surface from some hidden depth of her mind. That
memory was Will Ashton. “What the hell,” Kenna thought. It’s not
like she had any place else to go and no idea what the future held
besides a job application for an assistant district attorney
position. Kenna knew her subconscious had led her here to Will
Ashton and to Keeneston, Kentucky.

Kenna pulled herself out of her thoughts as
she drove up the driveway, surrounded by Bradford pear trees, and
made her way towards the bed and breakfast Paige had recommended.
“It's picture perfect,” Kenna said to herself as she got out of the
car and looked up at the three- story, white brick Victorian.

The green front door opened and a little
woman with a helmet of white hair stepped out. "Can I help you,
dearie?" she asked Kenna with a soft, Southern tilt to her
voice.

"Are you Miss Lily?" Kenna asked as she
started up the steps to the wraparound porch.

“Yes, surely I am,” Miss Lily answered, her
hands clasped in front of her and with a dishtowel casually draped
over her shoulder.

"Paige Davies said you had a room to rent
for a couple of nights?"

"Yes, I do have a room for you, dearie. Come
on in." Miss Lily turned and walked into the house, presuming Kenna
would follow right behind.

Kenna turned back to her car, grabbed some
of her bags out of the trunk, and hurried into the bed and
breakfast just behind Miss Lily. The house was huge with a grand
entranceway whose focal point was a wide sweeping staircase. There
were large, square shaped rooms off to her right and left.

"Over here are the private quarters," Miss
Lily said, pointing to the right. "This first room here on the left
is the sitting room for our guests. There are books and such in
there, and we have a fire at night in the old fireplace. The room
behind the staircase is the dining room.”

“I love it.”

“Well then, I'll put you on the second
floor. If you go up these stairs here, there will be another
sitting room. Your room is off to the left."

“Thank you, Miss Lily. I'm McKenna Mason.
It’s nice to meet you, and thank you for making me feel so welcome
in your lovely house.”

“Not a problem, dearie. I'll give you a
moment to settle in and lunch will be served in an hour,” Miss Lily
said as she turned to head into what Kenna guessed to be the
kitchen.

Kenna grabbed her bags and headed up a
staircase obviously made for a different time, a time when ladies
wore ball gowns so large they needed the six-foot wide stairs to
sweep down while making a grand entrance for a ball.

The sitting room on the second floor was as
large as the entrance way and full of overstuffed furniture and a
braided rug on the floor. It was the perfect place to curl up and
read a book. Two large windows overlooked the front yard and the
street. Kenna turned to her left and opened the door to the Man O'
War room. She had seen a lot of Man O' War names and couldn't
figure why a large and deadly jelly fish was so prominent in
Kentucky. Oh well, another Southern mystery she thought as she
tugged her bags into the room.

In the center of the room stood a huge,
king- sized, four- poster bed so high up, it had little steps to
climb up to get into bed. A TV was on top of an old oak dresser
that ran the length of the opposite wall. A window seat looked out
to the side yard and down towards Main Street. A private bathroom
with an iron claw tub finished off the room. It was amazing. Just
sitting in the room with the white lace curtains billowing softly
with a spring breeze coming in the open window was enough to make
her feel safe for the first time since she had left New York
City.

Kenna unpacked some of her clothes, put them
into the drawers, and went to wash up. It was almost time for lunch
and amazing smells were coming up from the kitchen. Her mouth
started to water as she thought back to the last meal she had at
McDonald’s the night before in West Virginia. She finished putting
the clothes away and opened the door to head downstairs. The door
across the hall from her opened and two impeccably dressed people
stepped out. They were dressed casually, well, as casually as you
can be dressed in Ralph Lauren, Kenna noted.

"Oh, we have another guest!" sang the women.
She was a couple inches taller than Kenna and in her early forties.
Her makeup was perfect in that understated way only movie stars
could manage. Her blond hair was pulled into a perfect pony tail
tied off with a white ribbon. Kenna realized that if one wasn't
used to shopping the expensive department stores like she was, one
would never know the woman was wealthy, well, except for the eight
carat diamond weighing down her ring finger. Compared to this
bubbly woman, Kenna felt much older than her twenty-nine years
after the pressure and stress of the last month. Kenna pasted on a
smile and turned to face the perky couple.

"So we do, honey," her husband said to her.
He matched her perfectly. Kenna placed him at fifty years old and
dressed in Ralph Lauren jeans and a white button up shirt. His salt
and pepper hair was perfectly trimmed. He let his right hand rest
lightly at the small of his wife's back.

"Are you here for the sales as well?” Mrs.
Perky Ralph Lauren asked Kenna.

"Sales? I didn't see any department stores
in Keeneston. I could do a little shopping.” A happy feeling washed
over her and Kenna’s smile turned into a real one. The kind of
feeling that only spending money on the perfect pair of sexy shoes
or finding that little black dress that hid ten pounds and
increased your bust at least one cup size could do for you.

“Oh! Oh, ha, a joke. Good one, little lady.”
Mr. Ralph Lauren laughed. Kenna darted a glance back and forth
between the couple, and apparently Mrs. Perky picked up on her
creased brow and look of utter confusion at the apparent joke she
had made.

“Julius, she’s not joking. Dear, I'm so
sorry. We thought any visitors would be here for the Keeneland
horse sales.”

So, Mr. Ralph Lauren was Julius. Apparently
they had come from out of town, out of state by Kenna’s guess, for
horse sales. That was good news for her since she had found out
Will still has a horse farm.

“I am so sorry. Since June and I are so
horse crazy, I just assumed you were too. I'm Julius Kranski and
this is my wife, June.” Julius turned and took his hand off his
wife's back to shake Kenna's.

June clasped Kenna's hand and lightly held
onto it when she introduced herself to Kenna. "So nice to meet
you!”

“Nice to meet you both. I'm McKenna Mason,
but you can just call me Kenna. It’s nice to meet some other people
from out of town. Where are you from?” she asked as she looked back
at June.