Love Takes a Village, page 1
Love Takes a Village
When Lena Preiss unexpectedly loses her job, her father convinces her to travel to Leavenworth, Washington, and help in her aunt’s new restaurant. The charming Christmas village in the Cascade Mountains is a gorgeous place for Lena to relax while between jobs, if not for the minor difficulty of feeding hundreds of tourists every night. Luckily, chocolatier Devin Meyer is on hand to take care of dessert.
Devin knows chocolate and enjoys nothing more than mixing and stirring the finest, smoothest, richest chocolate entirely by hand. She has returned home to help her father with one last holiday season before he retires and sells their family business. She is determined to spend the season planning for her future, but the beautiful and overwhelmed Lena proves to be more of a distraction than she expected.
Against a snowy backdrop glittering with Christmas lights, Lena and Devin learn how to shed the expectations of others and forge their own path—maybe one that they’ll share together.
Chapter One
Lena Preiss dragged one last document into the Greater Metro Medical folder before saving and closing the file. She leaned back in her chair and stared at her laptop’s galaxy wallpaper, waiting for the reality of her new jobless state to sink in. A few clicks of the mouse made for an anticlimactic ending to the months she had spent consumed by her work for GMM, and she didn’t even have the sense of closure that would have accompanied a sad trek to her car with a cardboard box full of her belongings. Her home office hadn’t changed since she was fired—although she had significantly less to do there at the moment—but she supposed she could box up her stapler and some old file folders and carry them down to her apartment’s garage and back, at least for dramatic effect.
That sounded like more of a ridiculous effort than it was worth, so instead she initiated a video call with Jacquie.
“They fired me,” she moaned as soon as her friend’s face appeared on her screen, with her bottle-blond hair tipped with purple and piled in a messy bun, and today’s glasses accented with green and yellow checkered squares. Lena knew without seeing that Jacquie’s brightness continued all the way down to her toes.
She sighed and dropped her forehead onto her desk in front of her laptop. The soothing balm of sympathy from her best friend would set her right again, giving her the strength to—
“Hmm.” Jacquie’s voice had enough of a skeptical tone to make Lena sit upright again. “Did they actually fire you, or did they just take the first out clause in your contract?”
“Hey, whose side are you on?”
Jacquie shrugged, giving Lena one of her playful smiles that made it very difficult to remain annoyed and not give in and smile along with her. Lena managed to resist the urge and sat back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest in a huff.
“I’m on the side of the woman who made me write the out clause into her standard contract,” Jacquie said, unmoved by Lena’s display of irritation. “Would you rather I was on the side of the woman who is surprised every time a company takes that exit opportunity?”
“Yes,” Lena said, spreading her hands wide for emphasis, “obviously.”
“Oh, poor baby,” Jacquie said, in a poor imitation of a truly sympathetic voice. “Did the mean company fire you without any justification? Let’s sue.”
“Can we?” Lena asked hopefully.
“No.” Jacquie returned to her normal voice. “Same answer as the last six times this happened. Besides, you know they won’t be able to implement this new EHR as easily as they think, and they’ll ask you back to help.”
Lena nodded. That was the pattern. She custom-created her Electronic Health Record platforms for each company she worked with, and then they had the option to retain her during the implementation phase or to manage it on their own. They always came crawling back and required her assistance as they integrated the program across their system. “That’s true,” Lena said, feeling a small glint of hope. She’d still need to find a new full-time project, but at least this one was still possibly going to generate some income. “This one was complex, with a variety of different types of clinics in the network. They’ll need help tweaking the program to make it work well for them all.”
“Yes, and then they’ll hire you back at a per diem rate that will be significantly lower than if they hadn’t taken the out,” Jacquie said, ruthlessly squashing Lena’s little bud of optimism before it had a chance to flower. “For the same work. Honey, you really need to let us change your contract before you get another job.”
Lena sighed again. Jacquie was right, of course, but Lena missed the good old days when her clients and her contracts were both simpler and more localized. She had started by creating EMRs for individual clinics and medical offices. They were usually smaller companies, and they couldn’t afford much, but she had been just starting out and didn’t charge much, so it was win-win.
Her standard contract in those days covered the entire process, from creation to integration and training in the new system, and she had been part of it all. She had gotten to know her clients, and they had even thrown her an occasional little party when her time with them was finished, to celebrate their new system and thank her for her work.
The sense of camaraderie had ended when she advanced to creating larger EHR platforms for multiclinic nationwide health-care systems.
“I got a lot of pushback on those full-service contracts once I was working with the bigger companies. I suppose I let them bully me into the less restrictive options,” Lena admitted. She was nothing but brutally honest with herself about her strengths and weaknesses. She was an excellent coder, but she hated the confrontation that was too often involved with the business side of her profession, and she freely acknowledged that she sometimes took the easy way out to keep the peace. She needed to trust Jacquie’s advice in these areas.
Jacquie tapped the screen with one pointy, lacquered fingernail. “Maybe so, but you were building your business and reputation, and I don’t think you made a mistake by compromising. Then. Now, you’re a proven entity, and your contract needs to reflect that. You can still offer the out clause, but it should come with a penalty. Plus, it should cost more, not less, to hire you back to bail them out when they can’t handle the integration on their own.”
“Okay, okay,” Lena said in a mockingly sullen tone. She hadn’t gotten platitudes and comfort from Jacquie, but the conversation still left her feeling better than she had before she called her friend. Wisdom and truth left her feeling more in control and less wallow-y than empty sympathy would have done. “I’ll have a shiny new contract, but no one to sign it.”
Maybe she was still wallowing a little.
“Well, I’ll get Rolf to work on your new contract, and you can go pound the virtual pavement. Something great will turn up. It always does.”
“Hopefully. I haven’t had potential clients lining up outside my door over the past six months, but I suppose I can—” She paused and glanced at her phone screen when it chimed. “Damn. It’s my dad. I should go, but I’ll—”
“No,” Jacquie said quickly before Lena could end the call, “put him on speaker so I can listen in. Please, please, pl—”
“Fine,” Lena interrupted, making a shushing gesture at her and answering her phone. “Hey, Dad,” she said.
“Hello, Lena,” he said, his voice sounding deep and echoey. She figured he was talking as he walked through the hospital corridors, probably signing forms and doing CPR on ailing patients as he went. He was the ultimate multitasker. “I heard you lost your job.”
Well, that story had spread fast. Her dad was the chief administrator in one of the Pacific Northwest’s largest hospitals, so he had his finger on the pulse of the medical world, but this news seemed too trivial to have reached him this quickly.
“How did you know?”
He paused for a moment, and she heard him speaking to someone else in a muffled voice about a delayed shipment of a new imaging machine before he came back on the line. “Bill from GMM is an old golfing buddy, and he told me you had finished the EHR when we were on the course last weekend. He said you did excellent work for them. Good job, Lena.”
“Um…thank you?” Lena said, unable to keep the questioning tone out of her voice. Her father was an unexpected source of sympathy, but Lena would take what she could get.
“Yes, this is excellent timing.”
“It’s…what?” Was his hospital looking to upgrade their EHR? That would be an amazing job, if not for the fact that her perfectionist father would be looking over her shoulder and watching her every move. She’d have to tell Rolf to triple her fee.
“Your aunt needs you to help with a new venture. She asked for you specifically this time.”
Oh God. Aunt Cheryl routinely bought failing companies and then needed Lena’s family to step in and help her with them. The task usually fell to Lena’s dad, who was unexpectedly indulgent of his younger sister, but Lena’s siblings had been roped into helping before, too. She had somehow managed to always be in the middle of a project when these summonses came in, but this time…
“Dad, did you get me fired?” She had to ask. The timing was too perfect…for her father, of course. Not for her.
He made an indignant scoffing sound. “Of course I didn’t.”
“Hmm. Do you wish you had thought of it before now?”
“No, although it would have saved me three afternoons of golf,” he said with a laugh. She wasn’t amused enough by the conversation to join in. “I know your work pattern. When Cheryl wrote to me about this new…” He hesitated, probably searching for a palatable word. “This new opportunity, I told her you were probably about to finish this latest project, and that you’d have a couple of months free before they brought you back to clean up the mess they made with it. For less money than they were paying you before. You really should rethink your contract.”
Lena heard a choked laugh coming from the region of her laptop, but she ignored Jacquie’s amusement and focused on her dad. She was torn between annoyance at his meddling and the resignation of yes, this is exactly something he would do that came from a lifetime of being Karl Preiss’s daughter.
“So I’ve heard,” she said. “How long have you known about this, anyway?”
“About a month.” She heard the shrug in his voice. “Cheryl was hoping you’d be able to start right away, but I told her she’d have to wait.”
“And it didn’t occur to you to tell me right away?”
“Of course not. You’d have been suspicious if I started asking about when you expected to be fired.”
“Not fired. Temporarily let go. And I certainly wouldn’t have been suspicious about my own father taking an interest in my work.” It was her turn to feign indignation, but she couldn’t pull it off convincingly. “Okay, maybe a little, but that’s because I’m not a fool. And I’m not going. I need to find another job now, so you’ll have to help her with whatever scheme she’s come up with this time.”
“Lena,” he said sternly, “don’t defy me. I raised you to be more obedient than that.”
Lena gave a snort of laughter. “No, you didn’t. You raised me to question authority and make my own choices.”
“Well, now I’m paying the price for that progressive child-raising bullshit,” he said. Lena thought she detected a hint of pride in his voice, but she knew better than to think she had won the war just yet.
He paused, then continued. “I did, however, raise you to be kind to your aunt and to take care of your family.”
Shit. She had no doubt about the hint of triumph in his voice this time.
“I don’t want to spend the winter cleaning alpaca poop,” she said, falling back on the pathetic whine of the defeated. “Send Mom.”
She added the last bit as a childish jab, since Cheryl and her “shenanigans,” as Lena’s mom called them, were one of the few things her parents ever argued about. Besides, as chief of surgery in the hospital’s neurology department, she was admittedly less able to fly to Cheryl’s rescue than Lena was.
“She sold the alpaca farm years ago,” her dad said, ignoring the other part of Lena’s comment. “This time it’s a restaurant in…Where was it? Oh yes. Leavenworth, in Washington. Cheryl remembered that you used to help your grandmother in the kitchen, and you have her old recipe book. Plus, I mentioned all those cooking classes you’ve taken. Apparently, Christmas season is the big tourist event for this town, so you just need to help her for a couple of months. Get some revenue coming in, then hand the job off to someone else and come back to Portland and get back to your own work. It’ll be like a vacation.”
Lena highly doubted that. “You mean I’m going to be expected to cook? For the public?”
“Cook, run the restaurant, that sort of thing,” he said, and she pictured him waving his hand dismissively. “It’s a small place in a small town. How hard can it be?”
Lena heard actual laughter from her laptop this time and hoped her phone would filter it out as background noise. “But I don’t have any experience with…” She hesitated. With any of that, she wanted to say, but he broke into the brief moment of silence she gave him.
“Great. That’s decided, then. I’ll let Cheryl know and send you the details she gave me. Mom and I will drive up there and come to the restaurant for dinner once you’re settled. Talk soon. Love you.”
“Love you, too,” Lena said out of habit, lowering the phone and looking at Jacquie, who was still overcome with mirth.
“I adore your family,” she said, wiping her eyes and scanning her screen, obviously searching the internet on a different tab. “You’re the weirdest blend of control and acceptance, and criticism and support that I’ve ever seen.”
Lena allowed Jacquie’s fascination with her family, since she knew Jacquie’s parents provided only the criticism and attempts to control, with none of the kinder aspects, in their relationship with her. Lena sometimes had to look hard to find them in her own interactions with her parents.
“I don’t know how to cook,” Lena said, interjecting her words with despair. At least cleaning alpaca poop didn’t require any skills beyond holding a shovel. Or a rake? Okay, she wasn’t qualified for that one, either.
“Are you kidding?” Jacquie stopped scrolling and returned to their chat screen to make eye contact with Lena. “You’re a wonderful cook. Wasn’t the sauerbraten you made a couple of years ago from one of your grandmother’s recipes? It was possibly the best meal I’ve ever had.”
“Thank you, but that was a meal for four friends, not a restaurant full of people. Plus, it took me six hours and every pan I owned.” She shook her head, remembering the state of her kitchen when she was done. She had even thrown out a couple of the worst pans rather than attempt to scour off the burned-on bits of sauce. She had enjoyed the cooking classes she had taken at local adult centers and community colleges whenever she had a chance, but in those she had always cooked one dish at a time, with all the ingredients thoughtfully laid out before her. At that rate, it would take her a full day to get all the orders out to customers.
“You’ll get faster with practice. Besides, won’t you have assistant chefs and dishwashers to help?”
“I don’t know,” Lena said warily, unsure what all was covered under her father’s that sort of thing. She might well be doing it all on her own. “I might be able to handle a food truck, I suppose. If we’re only selling sandwiches, or something easy like that. But entire meals, with garnishes and everything? There’s no way.”
“I’m going back to searching for this town,” Jacquie said, changing tabs again. “Isn’t it close to Seattle? You love Seattle. I’m sure you can go there once in a while for a concert or nice meal out, or…Oh. Well, that’s kind of far away, I suppose, and over the pass. And with unpredictable winter weather…Do you like to ski?”
“Not really,” Lena said, pulling up a map herself and hunting for Leavenworth. The first one she tried didn’t have enough detail to show the tiny town, so she searched another. It wasn’t a long drive from Seattle, distance-wise, but it was hemmed in by the Cascades and the Wenatchee Mountains.
“At least you’ll have plenty of time to get to know your aunt better,” Jacquie said. “She sounds awesome. Alpacas? German restaurants? She must have some great stories.”
Lena sighed. Of course Jacquie, with her diverse hobbies and unique taste, would find Cheryl’s life somewhat appealing, but to Lena and the rest of her family, her aunt’s eccentric choices were absolutely not aspirational. She had no idea how this highly focused, driven, and type-A family tree had spawned a twisty, aimless branch like her aunt’s.
“I don’t know any of her stories, except hearsay when Dad or one of the sibs comes back from helping her,” she admitted. “She’s always traveled a lot and has started businesses all over the country, so I rarely saw her when I was growing up. Just occasional holidays, I suppose.” She paused, thinking back to those deeply buried memories of her aunt’s visits. They had tended to be stressful times for her family, with her mother’s barely concealed disdain and her dad’s failed attempts to lecture his sister about settling down in a conventional, sensible job. They’d had paintings in their homes, but few family photos, so Lena couldn’t even call to mind an accurate picture of her aunt.
“She’s a really good hugger,” Lena said thoughtfully. “I remember that much, at least.”
Jacquie regarded her skeptically. “A good hugger compared to normal people, or compared to your family? Because I’m guessing that a chainsaw would be a good hugger compared to your family.”
Lena couldn’t argue with that. Her parents were definitely not the demonstrative sort. They were free enough with verbal praise—when they believed it was warranted—but there tended to be a lot of teeth grinding and grimacing if they tried to show physical affection. Lena admitted that her assessment might be slightly exaggerated, but not much. “Compared to normal people,” she said.
