over her was palpable. The arms she’d folded protectively across her chest fell. The shield over her expression dropped, and the shadow of wariness in her gaze lifted.
“Now that, Mr. Nicholsen, I would be happy to do.” She grinned and led me over to the edge of the workspace, stopping one of her assistants, Amanda, along the way to direct her where to put certain amounts of the bricks and to bring up the first few gallons of frosting.
“Please, call me Saint,” I heard myself offer with a low voice, knowing it wasn’t something I’d ever suggested to another employee.
Since she’d called me Saint the afternoon we met, the regression back to something more formal felt like nails down a chalkboard.
Her steps paused and she looked over to me.
“So, I did most of the prep work over the weekend. Measuring, taping, and then having Roberto construct the frame for support.” She pointed, and I followed her fingers along the two-by-four beams down to the painter’s tape stuck in markings on the floor. “I’m also double-checking the number of bricks as we start bringing them up because I think I’ll need more. And yesterday, we made one-hundred pounds of royal icing.” She chuckled to herself. “I’ve brushed my teeth probably five times, but I still feel like I can taste it on my tongue.”
“You don’t say.” I grunted and shifted my weight, the thought that a minute ago, I was almost tasting it too bringing back my uncomfortable level of desire.
Holly looked at me and her cheeks flushed, her thoughts joining mine for a second.
“So, a hundred pounds?” I nodded back to the pallet of bricks in front of her. “That will cover most of it?”
She burst out laughing, and I felt a little foolish.
The life-size house had been my idea, and I’d always supervised hiring the chef, but, if I was being honest, I’d never really asked about the particulars. As the manager of the hotel, I had a lot of moving pieces to coordinate around the holidays, so I didn’t—couldn’t have detailed knowledge of all of them.
“I don’t know the specifics of the previous ones, Mr. Nicholsen. But this isn’t going to be your average life-size gingerbread house.” She grinned at me with childlike excitement—like there was anything average about a life-size gingerbread house in the first place.
“Because you’re no ordinary pastry chef?” I prompted with subtle flattery. There weren’t too many people in the world that went from being famed architects to pastry chefs.
“Because I’m going to build a two-story gingerbread experience,” she continued, attempting to ignore my comment though the blush in her cheeks told me otherwise. “And I’m expecting it to require over three-thousand pounds of icing when it’s all said and done.”
I balked, swaying backward slightly in shock. “Two stories? Three-thousand pounds? Is that—”
“Of course, it’s possible.” She stared at me with a confident smile, enjoying what was apparently a humorous display of disbelief before putting me out of my misery and saying, “Let me show you.”
Reaching in her pocket, she pulled out a stack of folded papers, opening them to reveal blueprint-like designs for the house. And it was like she’d opened up a present, the way the explanation for her designs tumbled eagerly from her mouth over the next several minutes.
“It’s going to be the largest one every attempted, and I have the kitchen working on more bricks because I don’t have quite enough of those either.”
Not enough? The kitchen began preparing for this process months ago—they’d been making bricks for months and now, she was telling me we didn’t have enough. I stared at the drawing of the two-story, colonial-looking house, and asked, “How many do you need?”
Her eyes flicked to mine. “Six-thousand.”
“Six—” I broke off with a cough.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Nicholsen, you aren’t paying me by the brick,” she teased warmly, looking at me for the first time without any barrier shielding her stare, and though I laughed, it was partially to hide the prick of pain I felt when she refused to call me Saint.
Realizing the line she’d drawn, Holly continued, “It’s going to be a little over twenty-five feet high and forty-five feet wide.” Her hand pointed roughly to where the dimensions extended. “At about eleven feet deep, the private dining area should be able to seat about ten people, and I’m going to have a railroad track running through the whole display.”
“Wow.” There was no other word. Even that one wasn’t sufficient for what she had planned.
My fingers