Down Home Carolina Christmas. Pamela Browning

I thought—” Luke Mason aimed a confused glance at Mrs. Hatcher’s car as it rounded the corner at Palmetto and Main. “The air in my tires should be checked,” he said, sounding resigned and apologetic. “Is there another gas station open in town?”

      “Not that I know of,” Carrie said briskly as she retrieved the recipe for cheese potatoes from the copy machine, where she’d left it yesterday. It was the whole reason for her stopping by after church.

      “I usually carry a tire gauge with me, but it’s gone missing,” he said apologetically.

      “I’ve got one right here,” she said, scooping it off the desk and handing it over smartly.

      When Mr. Movie Star regained his equilibrium and snapped his mouth closed after dropping his jaw nearly to his ankles, she smiled sweetly. “Air pump’s over there,” she said, gesturing in its general direction.

      “Thanks,” he said doubtfully, and though she’d certainly like to get her hands on the Ferrari’s engine even for so lowly a job as an oil change, she wasn’t about to fall all over herself for the honor of pumping its tires full of air.

      Luke Mason was halfway to the Ferrari before he swiveled back toward his. “Is the owner here?” he asked. “Smitty?” That’s what the sign over the door said: Smitty’s.

      “That was my daddy. I’m Carrie Smith, and I inherited the station after he died.” Her grandfather had been the first Smitty, her father the second. No one had tried to call Carrie “Smitty” yet, and she hoped no one ever would. She liked her given name just fine.

      “Oh,” said Luke Mason, clearly surprised. “Sorry if I ruffled your feathers.”

      “No offense. It happens a lot. Now, I’ve got things to do, so you go right ahead. You can put the tire gauge on my desk when you’re finished with it.” With that, she pivoted and headed for the restrooms around the corner, her high heels clicking on the concrete apron surrounding the building.

      One thing Carrie hated was a dirty restroom, and she kept the ones at Smitty’s sparkling clean. When she had finished with both the men’s and the women’s, she hurried back inside the garage, expecting Luke to have gone. Instead he angled down tying his shoelace, affording Carrie a better view of a derriere that had been plastered all over the Internet a few months ago.

      Like almost everyone else in Yewville, Carrie had gawked at the pictures of Luke wearing nothing but a thong. The photos, purloined from some photographer who’d snapped them before Luke Mason became a star, had been zapped from computer to computer by every red-blooded Net-connected woman in town after they’d learned he was going to film a movie there. Well, Luke Mason had looked pretty good without much in the way of clothes, but Carrie, studying him from under her eyelashes, decided he looked even better with. In her opinion, men had no business revealing so much skin.

      “I put the tire gauge on your desk,” Luke said as he straightened.

      “Fine. Anything else I can help you with?” The Ferrari appeared in great shape; it was the two-seat F430 Spider convertible. Carrie happened to know that this particular model had a 4.3-liter V-8 engine that kicked out a whopping 490 horsepower, making it one of the few nonturbo or supercharged engines to produce more than a hundred horsepower per liter. The car was polished to a high luster, and Carrie wondered if Luke Mason had driven it all the way to Yewville from California. Or did he ship his car wherever he went so that it was ready and waiting for him when he stepped off his private jet? His plane was parked at the tiny Yewville airport, where no hangar was big enough to accommodate it.

      Luke jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I noticed the Marilyn Monroe calendar over your desk. It must be one of the first ones ever made.”

      “It’s a family memento, more or less.”

      “I was thinking,” he said, scuffing his foot for all the world like some of the local yokels when they stopped by to jaw with Hub, her other mechanic, on slow summer afternoons. “My producer might like to stop by your station sometime. We could use a garage like this in the movie.”

      Carrie narrowed her eyes at him and drew herself up to her full height of five feet five inches. “For what?” she asked skeptically.

      “We’re going to shoot scenes in a garage setting. This place is perfect.”

      “Hasn’t the movie company made all its arrangements by now? They’ve been around for months.”

      “The scouts originally decided to build the set of a garage in the abandoned Pease Roller Bearing building, but the deal fell through. Now we’re eager to locate a garage as true to the era as possible. We want a place with local color.” He smiled engagingly, quirking one eyebrow in the way that had made him famous, and she felt a flush of heat building upward from her midsection. That was a surprise; she was too young to be having hot flashes.

      In case her physical response was a sign that she was about to be bamboozled by the fabled Luke Mason charm, Carrie shook her head to clear it. “I am well aware of how Whip Productions is paying Bennett Seegers an outrageous sum to use his barbershop for one week in order to film you getting a haircut,” she retorted. “But I am flat-out uninterested in renting Smitty’s Garage. It was never meant to be a dad-blamed movie set.”

      He gawked at her as if she’d grown two heads. “I was only offering you a business opportunity,” he said. “Whip Productions has funneled a lot of dollars into this depressed economy, and some of that money could be yours.” She detected the beginnings of a small smile tugging at the edges of his mouth.

      Huh. Luke Mason might as well know that she didn’t see things his way. “Well,” she said, “the local textile mill closed, and I expect you’ve already figured out that’s why the economy went south. The stupid politicians and their stupid NAFTA treaty did that to us.”

      “Which is why filming Dangerous here is such a good idea. Our people rent places to live, and they patronize local businesses. They buy gas, too, as I’m sure you realize. I pushed for filming in Yewville because I wanted the money to go somewhere it’s needed.”

      Moviemaking as philanthropy was a new notion, but not one to which Carrie accorded much credence. “That’s real nice, Mr. Mason, but not everyone in town is going to kowtow to a bunch of strangers who think money can buy anything and everything,” she said.

      He seemed taken aback, and she plunged ahead, warming to her subject. “Why, with my own eyes I saw one of your people fork over a fistful of hundred-dollar bills for a car that’s been rusting in a field for ten years and has no engine. And Glenda at the Curly Q Salon told my sister that she’s getting twenty thousand because you’re going to move all her beautifying equipment to a warehouse and bring in old-fashioned hair dryers and pink sinks. Pink sinks! I never heard of such claptrap.”

      Luke had the good grace to look abashed after this long speech. “Miss—what did you say your name was?”

      “Carolina Rose Smith, and I deeply resent a bunch of left coast people taking over my town. Including the courthouse. You are planning to film at the courthouse, aren’t you?”

      He rallied smartly. “I believe so, for the wedding scene. Yancey Goforth got married in a simple civil ceremony because he had a big race coming up that week.”

      “It’s not necessary to tell me about Yancey Goforth, who was one of my granddaddy’s best friends. And while I’m at it, your costar, Tiffany Zill, does not look anything like his wife. Mary-Lutie Goforth was short and plump and had a sweet face, not all planes and angles like Ms. Zill’s, with which I am familiar because her picture is regularly plastered over every tabloid at the Piggly Wiggly.”

      Luke Mason seemed stunned at her tirade. “I guess you’ve wanted to get those things off your chest for a long time,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck and regarding her with a rueful grin.

      That whacked the wind out of her sails, all right. “I guess I have,” Carrie admitted unwillingly.

      “Maybe I should explain