Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 121898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
I walked over and bent down, getting the answer to my unspoken question.
A headband.
Why on Earth was a pig wearing a reindeer antler headband?
You know what? I wasn’t even going to go there. Castleton was full of peculiarities I’d long stopped trying to understand, and I was going to chalk this up as one of those.
Peculiar was really about the only word for it, wasn’t it?
All right, ‘bloody weird’ also worked, but that was two words.
I took the headband back into my car and tossed it on the front seat. There was a very good chance that my grandparents would know who the pig belonged to and could tell me where to drop off the headband.
I couldn’t believe that thought had crossed my mind. Returning a headband that belonged to a pig.
Jesus Christ. The countryside was scrambling my brain already.
I brushed it away with a swift shake of my head and started the car. It was getting bloody cold out here, and I wanted to get to my grandparents’ house before my nipples froze off. It was already pitch black and I hated driving in the dark as it was, never mind on country lanes in this pitch-black hell.
Still, I knew these pothole-ridden roads like the back of my hand.
The potholes, while annoying, were weirdly comforting. There was something to be said about a place that didn’t change, and it was great to see that Castleton Council were just as ruddy useless as they’d always been.
After all, why fill in potholes when you could give yourself a Christmas bonus? Pumping up a fat cat salary was a far more useful way of spending the resident’s local council tax than fixing the roads, after all.
I made the final turn to the road that would lead me to Castleton. Butterflies erupted in my stomach, and the feeling that tickled at my nerve endings was something between excitement and downright terror.
I hadn’t visited home in five years, and here I was, three weeks before Christmas, rolling into the village like I was coming back from the dead.
At least it wasn’t for anything bad. Like someone dying.
With my general life luck and my sister’s notoriously bad luck in the romance department, my family had started a literal betting pool thinking that I wouldn’t return until someone popped their clogs.
I couldn’t be mad about it.
If I’d been allowed to bet on myself, I’d have chosen that very option.
Thankfully for my baby sister, Hazel, her luck had changed two-and-a-half years ago when she’d met her now-fiancé, Julian. She’d screamed to me on that very day that he was The One. I had, as the dutiful big sister, promised I would come home for her wedding that she swore would happen, assuming it never would.
I didn’t tell her that, of course. In my defence, it wasn’t as if that feeling was entirely warranted.
Her three prior engagements hadn’t exactly fuelled me with the greatest confidence that she’d actually make it down the aisle with a man she’d met ten minutes before our phone call.
Well, I was eating crow.
Lots of it. Several murders of them, actually.
Julian had proposed to her last Christmas Eve, and that very lovely moment I’d witnessed on the screen of my laptop was exactly why I was chugging along the pitch-black lanes of rural Yorkshire on my way home.
Hazel’s Christmas-loving heart meant she had only one vision for her wedding, and that would be a winter wonderland on Christmas Eve. I couldn’t blame her—growing up where we did meant that loving the festive season was largely engrained into each and every resident, and she’d really taken it to heart.
Castleton was known for one thing and one thing only: Christmas. Every year was bigger, brighter, and better than the last. The tree in the village square was taller, the lights glittered more, and the overall vibe during December was very Mariah Carey.
On steroids.
With a cup of coffee in one hand and a Red Bull in the other.
My love for Christmas had somewhat dampened after living in the dreary greyness that was southern England. Wet and windy Christmas mornings in Dorset weren’t quite the same as the usual snowy dreams I’d grown up with in Castleton.
Seriously.
The town looked like a Christmas card.
I didn’t blame my sister for wanting to get married on Christmas Eve. I was also doubly glad that it meant I could see my grandparents and parents on something other than a screen since they’d visited me three years ago.
Not that my trip home was going to be relaxing.
Oh, no. Not for me.
I was pulling double wedding duty.
I wasn’t even charging my sister my full wedding planner fee, either. And yes, she could consider that her wedding gift. I’d pulled some big strings to get her the venue she’d wanted, and that hadn’t been easy given that it was condemned for destruction.