The Christmas Cookie Chronicles: Carrie Read Online Free Page B

The Christmas Cookie Chronicles: Carrie
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all for me, you have to make me a promise.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You cannot tell anyone about us. You cannot use our love affair to disabuse the sweetheart myth. You can’t capitalize on our failure to line your pockets. Especially when doing so will put Twilight’s livelihood in jeopardy.”
    “All right,” he said.
    “Promise me.” Desperate sincerity shone in her eyes.
    “I promise,” he assured.
    Her shoulders sagged visibly. “Thank you. If you keep your promise, then everything is square between us.”
    “I’ll keep it,” he said, mainly because he wasn’t any more eager than she was for the world to find out exactly how much he’d let her down.

 
    C HAPTER T HREE

    T wo days after her run-in with Mark, Carrie was at the Yarn Barn scowling at the cheery Christmas decorations that the knitting club had put up, but she wasn’t glaring at the ornaments as much as she was the current situation. Seeing Mark again had shaken her more than she’d anticipated.
    “Chill,” said Renee, the high school girl who worked for Carrie on the weekends. “You’re gonna pace a hole in the floor.”
    Carrie stood in front of the window looking out across the shopping center parking lot, realizing for the first time that she had been prowling like a cat outside a mouse hole. She crossed her arms over her chest.
    “What’s got you so worked up?” Renee asked, looking up for the first time that morning from the cell phone where she’d been engrossed in a game of Angry Birds.
    “Nothing. I’m not worked up.”
    “Uh-huh,” Renee said. “Sure you’re not.” The girl reminded Carrie far too much of her smart-mouthed self at that age.
    “Don’t you have work to do?”
    Renee shrugged, shoved a strand of purple hair from her forehead. “I already put away all the stock.”
    Ever since Mark and his stupid reality show had come to town, business had slacked off. It seemed everyone would rather gawk and follow the film crew around town than shop for yarn.
    Okay, she was cranky. She hadn’t slept well the last two nights, but it had nothing to do with Mark Leland and those pesky sex dreams she’d been having. “Not at all.”
    “What did you say?” Renee asked.
    Great. Now she was muttering under her breath. “Stop whacking pigs and knit something,” Carrie told her.
    With a long suffering eye roll perfected to an art form by sixteen-year-olds the world over, Renee turned off her cell phone and picked up the basket-weave scarf she’d been working on.
    The truth was Carrie was rattled. She thought she’d braced herself for seeing Mark again, but one look in those chocolate brown eyes and she’d known she was in trouble. All the old feelings had come rushing back, stronger than ever. Why? Because she thought she was long over him.
    No love like your first love , Flynn was fond of saying ever since she and Jesse got back together. In fact, it was something irritating that all the ladies of the Sweethearts Knitting Club said from time to time with smug, knowing smiles on their faces.
    Bah-freaking-humbug.
    So much for her goal of getting through the holidays as smoothly as possible. Just as she was about to turn away from the window, she saw a bus pull into the parking lot. She recognized it immediately. It was the vehicle Fact or Fantasy had rented to haul the crew around.
    It wasn’t as if she could miss it. A parade of cars followed behind, including a red convertible, packed with young women holding a banner that read: We Love You Mark.
    What a cluster circus. Carrie borrowed one of Renee’s eye rolls. The bus door opened and Mark got out, along with a willow-branch thin middle-aged woman in stern, red-framed square glasses. They started in her direction, the film crew and entourage following behind.
    For one panicked moment, Carrie thought they were coming into the Yarn Barn, then she realized with relief they were headed to her brother-in-law’s motorcycle shop located on the other side of her
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