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www.millsandboon.co.uk
To my friend, Doreen Cardwell
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER ONE
Forty days until Christmas…
THE doorbell ringing sounded like a cannon going off, the balls landing and exploding inside his own head.
Michael Brewster groaned, rolled over, pried one eye open and looked past an empty beer bottle, lying on its side, to his bedside alarm clock.
Six o’clock. Morning or evening? Morning. Who the hell would call on him at six in the morning? He pulled a pillow over his head, but the door chimed again, and then again. Groggily, grumpily, like a bear coming out of hibernation, he groped over the side of his bed, found a pair of jeans and pulled them on.
Bare-footed and chested, he stumbled down the hallway and threw open his front door. The bracing November air cleared his head, and he reluctantly bit back his temper.
His neighbor, Mr. Theodore, stood there, wizened as a little elf, looking impossibly cheerful given the early hour and the fact that the sky was a dark, leaden gray behind him, promising a grim day.
“Top of the morning to you, Michael.”
With his head thudding and his mouth feeling as if he’d cleaned toilets with his tongue the night before, Michael wanted to snap at the old man and slam the door. But how could he?
Michael had recently moved back to the home he’d grown up in, and Mr. Theodore was part of the treasured memories that had drawn him back here, to the house that still smelled of his father’s pipe. Michael and his brother, Brian, had raided Mr. Theodore’s garden and picked his carefully tended flowers for their mom. They had broken the branches of his crab apple tree while climbing it, and played Halloween pranks on him.
Despite that history, or maybe because of it, Michael had felt initial wariness when Mr. Theodore had approached him about working around his house. A carpenter by trade, Michael was financially in a position where he never had to work again.
Besides, by saying yes, would he leave himself open to being preached at? Mr. Theodore had always had an eclectic spiritual bent. He sang in his church choir, he was at ease discussing the Dalai Lama over the back fence. He usually had a book in hand of philosophy or poetry: Leopold, Thoreau, Frost.
But in his more honest moments, Michael wondered if maybe he’d actually said yes hoping his aging, well-read neighbor had an answer to the bankruptcy of his own spirit.
Everybody else seemed to have answers, theories about life and death and meaning, that they were, in Michael’s opinion, much too eager to share.
Mr. Theodore, however, had given no advice. While Michael rebuilt front steps and installed new windows, Mr. Theodore offered only small talk—how to look after geraniums, which of the neighbors made the best chocolate chip cookies—and endless work. When one job ended at his aging house another magically appeared.
But six in the morning? Mr. Theodore was pressing his luck.
“I was just wondering—”
Michael sighed inwardly, tried to guess. What hadn’t he seen? What repair had he overlooked in Mr. Theodore’s project-ridden house? Leaking roof? Dripping bathroom sink? Despite the hour, and a monstrous hangover, Michael was aware of feeling relieved. Something to do today, after all.
There was always something else to do, thank God. With nothing to do, Michael would surely be more lost than he already was, as lost as he had been before Mr. Theodore had come and knocked on his door for the first time and pulled him away from the perfect digital images of the huge plasma television set, the only purchase he had made with all that money.
Michael Brewster had not expected to end up unspeakably, unbelievably rich, at twenty-seven years of age. Had he ever dreamed it, he surely would not have seen it as a curse. But it was. And he would give all that money back in an instant if only—
“Christmas lights,” Mr. Theodore announced happily.
He must have registered Michael’s confused look.
“Christmas,” Mr. Theodore said. “It’s almost Christmas. Today is—” he consulted his watch for confirmation “—November 15. I always put up my decorations on November 15.”
But Michael hadn’t gotten much past the Christmas part. Peripherally, on the edges of the haze he lived in, he must have realized stores were decorating for Christmas, that fall color was gone and winter-gray had set in.
And yet, it felt as if he’d had no warning. Michael was swamped with feeling. Christmas? Already? How? For a shocking moment he could smell the tang of pine, and his mother’s pies baking, his father’s aftershave. He could hear his brother’s laughter, the ripping of tissue…the sensation of loss and of loneliness nearly knocked him off his feet.
And the question that burned in him, that made him toss and turn at night, that made him pace the floor, that made him drink too much beer and stare for hours at a TV screen in an effort to shut it out, was suddenly right there on his tongue. He tried to bite it back but it felt as though the question was going to strangle him if he did not ask someone, say the words, finally, out loud.
“How will I survive?” Michael Brewster said. His voice seemed normal enough, but an icy wind picked that moment to howl, and to turn his voice into a desperate whisper.
It was as he thought, as he dreaded: there was no answer to that question.
Still, Mr. Theodore touched his arm, and he found himself looking into eyes that were blue and ageless and full of strength and compassion.
“Find someone in more pain than you,” the old man said firmly, “and help them.”
Michael expelled his breath. An impossible solution. No one was in more pain than him. No one.
He said gruffly, “Where do you keep your Christmas lights?”
As it turned out, Mr. Theodore kept his Christmas lights in his garage. As it turned out, he kept enough outdoor Christmas decorations to rival Santa Claus. There were strings and strings and strings of house lights, acorn wreaths for the windows and doors, an electric waving Santa and a complete set of reindeer for the roof. There were life-size models of Mary and Joseph, a lean-to stable to house them and a donkey, for the front yard.
Michael was wrestling with that two-hundred-pound donkey when Mr. Theodore appeared and handed him a neatly folded piece of paper.
“What we talked about earlier,” he said. He gave the plywood donkey a happy pat, as if the damned creature lived, which Michael had been beginning to suspect. Then Mr. Theodore shivered, looked at Michael’s bare arms, shook his head and disappeared back inside his house.
What had they talked about earlier?
With the first snow of the year falling, imperious to the Michigan wind most people would have found impossibly bitter, Michael glared at the paper. He needed a lifeline, not a quote from the Bible, or the Dalai Lama or Thoreau or whoever Mr. Theodore was currently fascinated with. Still, he curbed the desire to crumple the paper and throw it away unread. Mr. Theodore, after all, had not given him poetry, or Bible verses or Thoreau so far. Maybe there was something on this paper he could hold on to. He opened it with the rough impatience of a man afraid to hope.
What was written there was a scrawled address at the east end of Washington Avenue. Michael recognized it as being in the rough part of Treemont, down by the old abandoned flour mill. Underneath the address was written a name.
Michael remembered their conversation from earlier. Find someone in more pain than you and help them.
As if, he thought cynically.
Still, the words printed untidily on the paper intrigued him. Pulled at him. The words said The Secret Santa Society.
Thirty-nine days until Christmas…
“I need an elf,” Kirsten Morrison said into the phone, “and not the one you sent me last year. I shouldn’t be fussy about a free elf? He got drunk and fell off the sleigh.”
A shiver went up and down her spine, she told herself only because the front door had opened, letting that chill breath of November in.
“A shortage of elves? Oh, a shortage of volunteer elves. So, what would I have to pay for an elf who wouldn’t get drunk and fall off the sleigh?” She said it as if she had money to spare for an elf, which she didn’t.
“Five hundred dollars? Are you kidding me? That’s robbery! What kind of person would rob Santa?”
She peered out her office door to see who had come in. There was no clear line of vision anymore. Once a small market, the front part of her space was now crammed with toys. Sixteen tricycle boxes had arrived this afternoon and were practically blocking the front door.
Trikes that had to be assembled at some point, she made a quick mental note. That was still far down the priority list. She caught sight of her visitor and involuntarily drew in her breath, suddenly not sure it was the air that had chilled her.
He was a big man, maybe a hair under six feet, but with astounding breadth across the shoulders that he brushed snow from. He wore no gloves though winter had decided to arrive last night with a vengeance, and even peering past obstacles she noticed his hands.
Strong hands, capable hands. Hands that could make a woman aware that she was alone, and that there were things, no matter how fiercely independent she became, that she was just never going to be able to do.
He was that kind of man, all right. The kind of man who made a woman suddenly and acutely aware of yearnings she could manage to keep secret—even from herself—most of the time.
He was the beginning of a story that ended happily ever after. Gorgeous in a dark way: unruly hair the color of rich chocolate fell past his collar; whiskers roughened chiseled cheekbones, highlighted a chin carved by the gods, and framed a mouth with lips that were full and sensuous but unsmiling.
And his eyes! Lord have mercy!
They were a shade of green she had never seen before, somewhere between jade and emerald, and they were fringed with a sinfully sooty abundance of lashes.
“Be there in a sec,” she called.
She turned from him, trying to focus on the business at hand. “Five hundred dollars for an elf! Where is your Christmas spirit? Oh! Same to you!”
She smashed down the phone, glared at it, but she was aware she was marshaling herself. Finally, she wove her way through the impromptu storage area the storefront had become. It was getting tight, and a few boxed dolls fell from the top of the last stack of toys she had to negotiate past before she could get to the tiny remaining space by the front door. Space filled by him.
He caught the toppling dolls before they hit the floor, moving with the smooth and effortless speed and grace of an athlete. It put him much too close to her, and she found herself having to crane her neck to look at him, at the same time as being enveloped by an aroma that was clean and crisp and utterly, intoxicatingly male.
Shoot, if he wasn’t even more compelling to look at close up than he had been from a distance! Except for his eyes. This close to him, Kirsten could see something shadowed the green, like ice forming on a forest pond. She tried to name that something and failed. Whatever it was, it put the chill that had swept in the door with him to shame.
He looked at the dolls, both dressed in extravagant princess frills, and handed them to her as if they might burn his hand if he held them too long.
“Thanks,” she said drily. She refrained from adding, As far as I know these dolls do not come in a model that bites big, masculine guys. Mores the pity, she decided.
“Somehow, you don’t look like you’re here to deliver a Santa list,” she said, when he didn’t volunteer what had brought him inside the door clearly marked The Secret Santa Society.
He didn’t reply. In fact, he reached behind him and shut the door, which was leaking cold air, with a snap.
“Oh.” Kirsten had been warned it was a rough part of town. She’d been told over and over to lock the door when she was in the building by herself. But what if someone came to deliver a list and the door was locked? Even one mom, turned away…she shivered.
Besides, the awareness she felt for this man that had appeared in her space was not of the fearful variety though certainly of the dangerous variety.
He was a man attractive enough to make a girl who had given up on fairy tales feel strangely threatened, as if a review of her belief system might be in order. It had been four years, after all…
“So, no Santa list,” she said, aware her cheer was forced, that she was fighting something within herself, “What can I do for you?”
He was watching her with the faintest interest touching his eyes, eyes that seemed deeper and darker the longer she looked at him, but no warmer. There was something in them that reminded her of an iceberg—magnificently beautiful, but fearsome and remote, untouchable.
“I heard you were looking for an elf.”
She was not sure she would have been more shocked if he said he was looking for The Treemont School of Ballet. The words, faintly playful, did not match his eyes. His delivery was absolutely deadpan, and then she realized he had overheard her conversation. She waited for him to smile—to see if a smile would warm his gaze—but no smile was forthcoming. It was as if he could say the words that were tinged with humor—since he was obviously the man least likely to ever be mistaken for an elf—but somehow they couldn’t break through the ice that shrouded his eyes.
“Ah,” she said. “An elf. I’m in desperate need of one, but I’m afraid you’re the wrong size. No applicants over four foot eleven. Last year’s was four foot seven.”
She found herself holding her breath waiting to see if he would smile.
“But he got drunk.” He’d heard a lot of that conversation. Still no smile. Anyone who was not going to smile over a four-foot-seven drunken elf probably wasn’t going to smile about anything. It had the ridiculous effect of making her feel as if she had to make him smile, even though she was more than aware her belief system was on shaky ground, and she shouldn’t be testing its strength.
“He got very rude,” she said, ignoring the shouldn’t. “He kept asking Santa to pull his finger.” In her eagerness to make him smile, she could feel that telltale hint of heat in her chest.
As a schoolgirl, Kirsten had been tormented by blushing. In more recent years, she’d been able to head off the embarrassing tide of crimson by thinking, quickly, of something—anything—else. For some reason the fish display at O’Malley’s Market provided some of the most powerful mind-diverting pictures. Trout, eye in.
“Sounds like a good reason to trade in for bigger elves,” he said. “Those small ones can be so unpredictable.”
“We’ve never had a large elf!” Rules. She found refuge in rules.
“Sorry to hear that—it’s probably an unfair hiring practice, punishable under the equal opportunities act.”
“Actually, I think it’s impersonating an elf that is punishable by something.” For some horrible reason the word spanking came to mind and for a minute she had to close her eyes and picture freshly filleted perch. When she opened them, she said, more weakly than she intended, “Forced ingestion of Christmas cake, egg nog and Christmas carols!”
Still no smile, but just a hint of something in those mysterious eyes, the tiniest spark of sunlight flashing across green ice.
“Now who is impersonating whom?” he asked. “I heard you claim on the phone you were Santa. An obvious lie. Santa would never think of cake, egg nog and carols as a punishment. Plus, no white beard, no belly like jelly.”
She was the one who smiled then, reluctantly delighted by this spontaneous, dangerous exchange with a most mysterious stranger on a dull, gray afternoon. She smiled until the exact moment she became aware, and acutely so, that he was inspecting her!
She realized she looked about as far from the heroine of a happily ever after kind of story as anyone could look. The warehouse section of the building, behind her office, could get cold and very dusty. She was wearing a faded brown skirt, warm tights, sensible shoes, a cardigan worn at the elbows. Her hair suddenly seemed horrible, and she wished she would have let Lulu, one of the volunteers, streak the mousy-brown to blond last week when the woman had practically begged her to let her do it.
“Kirstie” Lulu had said. “You’re twenty-three. You shouldn’t look forty!”
Naturally, now she wondered if she looked forty today! That, she told herself, was what a man did.
All of a sudden, a woman who had not been on a serious date in four years on purpose was worried about her cardigan and her hair color and was thinking, wistfully, of the donation of twenty-four shades of lipstick sitting, unopened, on her desk.
All of a sudden a woman who was pragmatic to a fault was thinking if Cinderella can do it, so can I.
“I can’t help it if your vision of Santa is limited,” she said, trying valiantly not to show how flustered her own treacherous thoughts were making her. “Around here, I am Santa. Or at least the spirit of Santa. I make sure the kids in this neighborhood get Christmas gifts.”
“Even the most liberal of them must be shocked to find out you’re Santa,” he said.
He did not seem moved by her altruism. If anything, a cynical line deepened around his mouth. It annoyed Kirsten to realize that she wanted him, a complete stranger, to be impressed with her activities and accomplishments, probably because she knew her appearance had failed to impress him in any way.
“Well, they don’t find out. That’s why it’s the Secret Santa Society. We elect one of the volunteers to play Santa. The election is the highlight of our volunteer party.” Now she was giving him all kinds of dull information he couldn’t possibly want, and she was aware she felt aggravated and defensive.
Why? Because of the cynical downturn of his mouth? Because he was looking at her like she was a Goody Twoshoes?
Because she could have had her hair streaked and hadn’t?
It was time, obviously, to end this encounter.
“So, unless you’re going to sue me because I have no elf positions available, I have a lot of work to do.”
When was the last time she’d been this rattled by a guy?
That was easy. Her one and only serious relationship, her first year of college. James Moriarty. He’d pretended he liked her—no, was smitten with her—for a heady six weeks or so. He had really wanted help cheating on his math exam.
And then there was Kent, her brother-in-law—ex-brotherin-law—pretending to be Mr. Boy-Next-Door, the perfect husband. But when the whole family had most needed him to be strong, what had he been doing? Playing footsie—and much more—with his secretary.
She shivered. And that was why she was sworn off fairy tales. Men, in all their thousands of guises, were never what they wanted you to think they were. Especially fickle would-be ones like this one: big, athletic, sure of himself, drop-dead gorgeous.
Though this man in front of her did seem to be without pretense, something so real lurking in the depths of those astonishing cold, hot eyes that it threatened her heart’s armor. She tried to put her finger on it. Lost? No, not quite, though the very thought added an intriguing layer to the man who stood there dripping confidence and melting snow.
Predictably, he ignored her dismissal, “Even I’m not hardhearted enough to sue the Secret Santa Society.”
Confirming what she already could see in the cast of his face. He was world-weary in some way. Cynical.
Not the jovial grandfatherly type who usually stopped by to volunteer.
“So, no available elf position,” she said. She fully intended for it to sound like a breezy dismissal, but even she could hear the renegade regret in her voice as if she truly would like to give him a position even though a man like him would never really volunteer at an organization like this, and even though she had decided she didn’t like him. Or at least didn’t like what he was doing to her. Then she blushed.
It came without the warning heat in her chest first, no time to ward it off with visual images of fresh fillets. When she blushed, her whole face went crimson, from jawline to forehead, like a red Christmas light blinking to life.
And then he did smile, finally, just a tease of one, a slight curl of lip, as if smiling might hurt him. The smile didn’t have a hope of touching what was in those eyes.
“I can do other things,” he said. “Besides be an elf.”
“Like what?” she gasped. Ridiculous to ask. He had said it reluctantly and she had already decided she wanted him out of here. He was the kind of man who could hurt a woman—especially one like her—very badly. He could do it without half trying, and he could do it without looking back.
The smile was gone completely. He regarded her thoughtfully for a long moment. The moment stretched.
She realized, wildly, that she had left herself wide-open. Of course there were other things he could do and do well. The shape of his lips, for instance, suggested he would be an amazing kisser. All kinds of men would have jumped on the opportunity to let her know that, and all the other skills that she was missing out on, too.
But this man did not take the opportunity, thankfully, to flirt with her, even though he looked like a man who would be very comfortable flirting with women. Gorgeous women, who streaked their hair and managed to get some lipstick on every day, and wore hip-hugging tight jeans instead of frumpy brown skirts.
Kirsten’s flirting days, if they could be called that, were far, far behind her. And somehow, maybe because of that secret his eyes were trying to tell her, she suspected his were, too.
She thought he was not going to answer at all, And then he said, gruffly, reluctantly, “I guess that depends. Is there anything else you need done?”
Her thoughts were renegade. What woman could be in a room with a man like this and not think of all the things a woman alone would like done?
That little knot rubbed out of the tender place where her shoulder joined her neck, for starters.
She was stunned at herself.
Four years. Virtually a nun. Wanting it that way. The breakup of her sister Becky’s marriage—a love Kirsten had unabashedly idolized—had broken something in Kirsten, too. Becky and Kent had begun dating just after the James fiasco, and just as Kirsten’s own parents were ending their twenty-year union. Still a teenager, impressionable, hopeful, naive, Kirsten had transferred her need to believe in love—in forever—to Becky and Kent. Instead, in the end, they had reinforced her deepest fear: things that seemed strong could be so, so heartbreakingly fragile.
“Is that why you’re here?” she said, not trying to hide her incredulity. “To volunteer?”
He hesitated, nodded. Sort of nodded, the slightest inclination of his head. “I’m a carpenter by trade. Anything you need built?”
She sighed. Even if she took his offer more practically, there was so much she needed done. Sixteen tricycles to begin with. Of course he wasn’t really here to help her, though there was nothing she could use right now like a strong, healthy man to unload trucks, to put heavy items up on high shelves. And a carpenter? Every year they built a sleigh to deliver gifts. It was built on top of the rickety flat-deck trailer in the warehouse. Every year she was amazed someone didn’t get hurt, and that it didn’t rattle apart.