Page 44 of Wish You Faith (Christmas Sweethearts #1)

“Let me get this straight.” Cyrus Theroux splayed his fingers on the long worktable at one corner of the warehouse.

He glared at Mrs. Untermeyer’s daughter, sitting across the table from him. Her back was facing the exit sign leading to the lobby and lunchroom. Above them, the high ceiling of the cavernous warehouse loomed, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Cyrus drew a deep breath, forming his next words cautiously. “I told you that Christmastown operates on a five-year business plan, but you just said you have no idea what you’ll be doing in five months.”

“I’m a destination wedding photographer, and I go where I get paid,” Amy Untermeyer said.

“But five months from now, we’re smack dab in the middle of Christmas.”

Amy shrugged.

“It sounds—and looks—like you don’t care about the company your grandpa started.” Cyrus frowned as best he could to emphasize his point.

Well, maybe he shouldn’t have played the emotion card, but the words had left his lips.

Amy remained seated. “I care, but Mom was supposed to run it, keep it in the family.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, your mother is up there in age, and she’s got a bad hip and a couple of bad knees. She’s been talking about moving to an assisted-living home.”

Amy looked stunned, like that was new information to her.

Cyrus wondered if he should have said all that, but there it was. Those words had rolled out onto the battlefield and now faced this Goliath.

Amy looked like she didn’t know how to respond.

Usually, Cyrus could read faces pretty well, but this time, he couldn’t figure out which way the conversation was going, so he waited for Amy to make the next move.

She sat there. Stoic. Silent.

“Your mother said that her sons approved,” Cyrus added.

Well, okay, bringing in Amy’s brothers—one deployed in the Special Forces to places unknown, the other a chef on a cruise ship somewhere, and both who hadn’t come home for Christmas in a few years—probably was a bad idea.

“My brothers?” Amy chuckled. “They don’t care about Christmastown.”

“And you do?”

Ouch. Cyrus quickly prayed for wisdom from God to shut his mouth before he snapped out another snide remark.

Still, it was true. Mrs. Untermeyer had said that while she had seen her sons once three years ago, this was the first time Amy had come home for a visit in five years. The fact that she was only here for a couple of days would make nary a difference in his business plan.

“Mrs. U sold me fifty-one percent of Christmastown last year. I’ve been running the company all this time, and we’ve been doing well. And now you show up.” Cyrus straightened up. “You’re dropping in for an inspection?”

“I was out of the country last Christmas, and I let it go. I thought I had time to discuss things with you. When Dad was running Christmastown, he didn’t open for business until October. I didn’t expect the warehouse to be operational in the summer.”

“Well, this is how I run things, Miss Untermeyer. I’m growing the company, and it’s open year around.” Just for good measure, Cyrus repeated it. “All. Year. Round.”

“It’s still July!” Amy said. “Christmas doesn’t begin in July. It doesn’t even begin until after Thanksgiving.”

“Says who? Some people put up a tree at the end of October.”

“You do?” Amy asked.

“Aunt Marie wants it up by early November.”

And Cyrus’s uncle, Melvin Theroux, would do it for her sake, year after year. But this year, Uncle Mel was beginning to become as feeble as Aunt Marie.

Amy’s face finally changed. “How’s Marie?”

“She just turned eighty-six years old.”

“No way.”

“Uncle Mel is pushing ninety-five. Can you believe it?”

“Well, he’d always looked wrinkly…pardon me.”

Cyrus laughed. “Aunt Marie sometimes calls him her shar-pei. Woof!”

“Might be because he’s out in the sun a lot in that nursery of his. Does he still have it?”

“He sold it to me.” Cyrus stopped laughing. “And that’s how it all began. Mrs. U was at the nursery, ordering poinsettias for Christmastown, when I was getting a tour of the tree farm next door.”

Amy said nothing.

Cyrus wondered what was going through her mind. He wished he hadn’t mentioned the tree farm.

He had wanted the Christmas tree farm as part of the sale of Christmastown, but Mrs. Untermeyer had held it back. Said her husband would have wanted her to keep maintaining it.

Cyrus would be more than happy to take over the tree farm.

It dawned on him that if Mrs. Untermeyer gave Amy the tree farm, his prickly business partner would suddenly have at least 55 percent of the shares of Christmastown.

Yikes.

Time to put my guard up!

The last thing he needed was to let Amy have leverage. He wanted to run Christmastown the way he wanted to run it. So there.

He studied the woman across the table. She still showed no emotions, except for that shrug earlier and her stunned look a bit later. He wondered how much he should say, and decided to summarize it, just in case she had some nefarious motives up her sleeves to reclaim or take over Christmastown.

There was no way he was going to let this world-traveling absentee daughter of Mrs. Untermeyer’s snatch this proper business out of his hands.

“So in one fell swoop, you bought two businesses,” Amy finally said.

“Struggling businesses. I could lose all my money.” In retrospect, he shouldn’t have sold his house in Atlanta, some stocks, and all of his inheritance money to pay for them.

He had done what he hadn’t learned at the MBA program at Clemson: put all his eggs into one basket.

Sometimes Cyrus wondered if Mrs. Untermeyer’s whole reason of shaking up her family business was to bring her only daughter home to Savannah.

Well, here she is.

Pretty she might be, but roses have thorns…

“Look, I need this company to thrive,” Cyrus said. “Or else I’ve lost all my investment.”

“That’s the problem. The love of money is the main reason gobs of companies have cannibalized Christmas!”

“You mean commercialized Christmas?”

“I said cannibalized . Did you want to speak for me?”

“Ah… No, ma’am. Sorry. Go on.” Cyrus felt slapped. Just because Amy looked like she was still in her twenties—at most, late twenties—compared to his early thirties, it didn’t mean he could look down on her as being still a youth.

“Like I said, Christmas doesn’t begin in July,” Amy snapped. “Do you know it’s ninety-three degrees outside today?”

Cyrus wanted to say something, but Amy waved her arms about.

He didn’t have to turn around to know that she was pointing to the interior of the warehouse behind him, to the rows of shelves and boxes, the forklifts passing by them with more shipment from China. Fake Christmas trees that they could store year round.

“All these represent the cannibalization of Christmas,” Amy said above the noise of the passing forklift.

“Didn’t your dad build this warehouse to replace an old one?”

“Yeah, but Christmas wasn’t this commercialized when I was growing up.”

“We all long for days gone by,” Cyrus hissed.

“All? Not all.”

“Are you correcting my words now? Speaking for me?” Cyrus tipped his head.

“Touché.”

“We make a great pair—uh… Why did I say that?” Cyrus leaned back in his chair.

“They’re just words.” Amy seemed to brush him off. “The point is, Jesus wasn’t even born in December, was He? Christmas is a commemorative season, not a real birthday holiday.”

“I, for one, am glad we have a time of year to remember Jesus, who is my personal Lord and Savior. We have Christmas, and we have Easter.”

“Don’t get me started on Easter. Some say the word is derived from an old word for some spring goddess. Does that sound biblical to you?”

Yikes. Where is this woman from? “Don’t you think we need to celebrate the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ?”

“Yes, but why don’t we call it Resurrection Sunday instead of Easter Sunday?”

“We can,” Cyrus said. “Others might not want to. It’s their prerogative. But back to Christmas. Christmastown is a decorating business, and that has been the focus since your grandpa started the company back in the fifties, according to Mrs. U.”

Now Amy was visibly moved.

Maybe it was because Cyrus had mentioned Grandpa Earnest. He wanted to test it again, but he’d better not. No point poking the rattlesnake when she was already riled up.

But it was time for him to end the meeting and get back to business.

“Miss Untermeyer, if you feel that strongly about un-Christmas, feel free to sell me your minority share of Christmastown,” he said.

“Why should I? The memory of my dad is in Christmastown.” Amy’s shoulders slacked. She sank into the chair. Pointed here and there. “I used to come here with my brothers, and we’d skate up and down those aisles. Dad would be furious when he found us.”

Cyrus turned his head to see where Amy was pointing. “It’s dangerous to play in a working warehouse.”

“We were teens.”

“Yeah. I’ve been a stupid—strike that!—regular teen myself.” Cyrus cleared his throat.

“You said it. I didn’t. I was the one who always got into trouble with…with…”

Silence.

“Grandpa Earnest?” Cyrus took in a deep breath. “Tell you what. We just met each other when you walked in an hour ago. Let’s just take it easy, and talk business another time.”

“There’s no other time. I’m gone in two days, remember?”

“When you come back then?”

“After Christmas.”

“Wow.” Cyrus prayed quickly for the right words. “You’re not coming home for Thanksgiving and Christmas again?”

“Home? Savannah is Mom’s hometown, not mine…”

Even as her words trailed off, Cyrus sensed some sort of nostalgia. And remorse, perhaps?

Amy sighed. “After Christmas I have some weddings to shoot in Auckland, then Rio.”

“Auckland, as in New Zealand? Rio, as in Brazil?”

Amy nodded.

“All the way to the Southern Hemisphere?”

“That’s where those places are, the last time I checked. It’ll be warm-weather weddings in January. Your point, Cy?”

Cy? She calls me Cy?

Nobody calls me Cy but my close friends…and Mom.

“I’m sorry. You don’t like to be called Cy,” Amy said.

“Huh?”

“Your face just changed.”

“What?”

“When I called you Cy.”

“I just had a memory. That’s all.”

“Memory of?”

“Mom.” Cyrus didn’t know why he answered her. It had been a private thought. Oh well. It’s out now. “She called me Cy all the time.”

“Called?”

“She passed away last year. She left me all her inheritance—I’m her only son—and I spent it all on Christmastown.

It has to work, or I’ve failed big time.

” Cyrus straightened up. “Look, I’ll be putting in a thousand percent of myself into this company, and I only have fifty-one percent of the profits.

It seems to me that if you’re going to leave after Christmas—or whenever—you’re declaring that you’re not doing your fair share. ”

“I have a job to get back to.”

“Well, this is my job now. If you do nothing—or only one or ten percent—and I run the company all by myself when you’re not here, it’s hardly fair for you to get forty-nine percent of the profits.”

Amy didn’t reply, so Cyrus continued. “Sell me your share, and you can go free, back to your travels or whatever. I’ll gladly do all the work here to keep Christmastown going.”

Cyrus waited.

“You’re not an Untermeyer,” Amy finally said.

“And you know how to be one?”

As soon as Cyrus said those indicting words, Amy sprang up from her seat and strutted out of the noisy warehouse, leaving him sitting there, wondering what he had just done.