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But to invite a temptation like him into her space? This was her world. It was where everything was in her control—and she wasn’t surrendering that for a better sleigh!
Besides, she found it hard to believe he’d come here to volunteer. He just wasn’t the type. No, he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, and decided to amuse himself at her expense for a few moments.
In a fairy-tale world, he would be the answer to unassembled trikes and a safe sleigh for Santa. In a fairy-tale world he would be the answer to everything including the fact that sometimes in the night she awoke and felt almost weak with loneliness.
But she had learned the brutally hard way there were no fairy tales, and a woman was wise to be totally independent, to rely only on herself.
She folded her arms firmly over her chest.
What was it, lingering just beneath that ice in his eyes, that made her think something else was there? Something that you could trust with your secret burdens?
Something that would break your heart in two more likely, she warned herself.
As if her heart wasn’t already broken in two. Hers. Her sister’s. Her brother-in-law’s. Her nephew’s. A world that had seemed so strong, a vow that had seemed unbreakable, gone in one second.
She turned back toward her office, remembering the relative safety of all her pressures, not wanting to dwell on things broken, a category this man seemed like he might fit in. She had no time for an encounter like this one, nor was she brave enough to find out exactly what his offhanded offer might mean.
“I have to find an elf,” she said, dismissing him, yet again. “And fifty kids’ winter jackets would be nice. That’s what I need done.”
There. That should be enough to scare him off.
Then again, he did not have the look of a man easily scared. Silence. She glanced back at him. He had not moved, there was a little puddle on the floor where the snow was melting off of him. He was wearing a black leather jacket, worn, and not warm enough for today, and jeans with a hole clear through the knee, not a day to be showing bare skin, either.
Rather than making him look poor, the old jacket and the worn jeans had a certain cachet.
She realized she was looking at a man who didn’t care—not about what he looked like, not about the cold, maybe not about anything at all.
He was exactly the kind of man her mother had always warned her about. But then that was one of the illusions she’d had to leave behind. That her mother knew best.
Her mother, who couldn’t glue her own marriage back together, her mother who had approved of Kent for Becky…Kirsten shook her head, looked away from him, troubled, looked back in time to see him nod, once, curtly. He turned and disappeared back out the door, leaving another frosty wave in his wake.
She was aware of craning her neck to see where he went, but the snow was still coming down hard, and he disappeared into it with a phantomlike quality, as if maybe he had never been in the first place.
She frowned. She wasn’t quite sure what had happened there.
“Strange encounter of the weird kind,” she said, shrugging it off and moving back to her office. She looked at her calendar. Thirty-nine days!
Way, way too much to be done, and not nearly enough time left to do it. She had not one second to spare on thinking about green eyes like those ones. What was in them? Loneliness. No. Aloneness.
Closer. The aloneness of a man who had seen hell, she decided. To feel sympathy for him, to be drawn toward the mystery in those eyes would be the most dangerous thing of all.
Not one second, she chided herself. The door opened again, and she whirled back, disgusted that she wanted it to be him.
But it wasn’t. It was Mr. Temple, the neighborhood postman, only these days he wasn’t just delivering her mail.
“Those Johansson kids are poor. They don’t expect nothin’, they don’t even hope. Imagine those poor little mites not hopin’ for anything. I told them to just pretend it could happen.”
“And?” she said.
He passed her a note, a glisten in his eyes, her most enthusiastic researcher, neighborhood spy and conspirator.
It had the boys’ address on it, she recognized it as a particularly dilapidated apartment on Fifth Street. Hans wanted a bike. Lars wanted a basketball.
“Got it,” she said, and for a moment she felt the weight of these new wishes that had been entrusted to her. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t enough money or time. Every year it seemed she would run out of both, and every year miracles happened. A few more phone calls, a few more letters, a few more radio shows. Besides, it was always a relief to get requests that could be fulfilled. She had a file—the Impossible Dreams File—of ones that could not.
“I’ve got something else for you, Kirstie.” He held it out with pleasure.
She couldn’t believe it. “Where on earth did you get this?” she asked, taking the catalog reverently from him.
“I’d tell you,” he kidded, “but then I’d have to kill you.”
It was the Little in Love Special Christmas Catalog. Only those who had reached the tier of Serious Collector of the precious figurines received it, and Kirsten was fairly sure she would never be one of those. Currently she ranked on Tier One, a Little Fan. On the tiny salary she was paid here, she could manage only one new figurine a year. Including gifts, and the odd find at a secondhand store, Kirsten now owned twelve of the hundreds of figurines that were available.
Little in Love was a collection of hand-painted porcelain bisque figurines that artist Lou Little had created in the 1950s. All the figurines were of a young couple, Harriet and Smedley, and depicted delightful scenes of their love. Little had captured something that captured hearts: innocence, wonder, delight in each other, and he never seemed to run out of material.
Trying not to appear too eager or too rude, Kirsten scurried back to her office and shut the door. She opened the catalog with tender fingers and gasped.
In an astonishing departure from tradition, the new Christmas collectibles were called A Little History and showed Harriet and Smedley in different times in history: here he was a World War I flying ace, leaning out of his plane to kiss Harriet goodbye, here he was as a pioneer building a Little house, Harriet looking on.
Then she saw it. A Knight in Shining Armor. She thought it was the most beautiful Little piece she had ever seen with Smedley, visor up, astride a magnificent white horse, leaning down to kiss Harriet’s hand.
She looked at the price, winced and mentally filed the piece—everything in this catalog—in her own impossible dreams file. Reluctantly, she put the catalog away. She would take it home with her and pore over the pictures later.
Really, the catalog should have been more than enough to sweep that other encounter right from her mind. So she was amazed, and annoyed, that it had not. Her mind kept wandering from the bookkeeping tasks. Not that engrossing, but as the Secret Santa Society’s founder and only paid employee, one of her biggest responsibilities. Rather than Smedley on horseback proving a distraction to her afternoon, it was eyes as coolly green as pond ice that she kept thinking of.
“And that is why you don’t even deserve to be a Serious Collector,” she reprimanded herself firmly.
CHAPTER TWO
WHEN Michael Brewster headed back out the door of The Secret Santa Society it was snowing harder. The office was on the mean end of Washington, most of the storefronts boarded up, shadows in the doorways. He noticed a man huddled in the doorway next to her building. Waiting for an opportunity to slip through that door and help himself?
She had paper taped over her own windows, probably to keep kids from peeking in at all her top-secret activities, but from a security point of view it would have been better if she left the windows unblocked.
Michael gave the man a look that sent him scuttling.
It was not the kind of neighborhood where a woman should be working alone—especially not with every available space in the made-over store stuffed with, well, stuff. Teddy bears, MP3 players, trikes, dolls in cellophane wrappers, including those embarrassing two that had fallen into his hands.
She was the kind of woman who made a guy feel protective. Maybe it was because her clothes had been baggy, that she had seemed tiny and fragile. Still, even with the lumpiness of the dress, she hadn’t been able to totally disguise slender curves, a lovely femininity that might make her very vulnerable at this desperate end of Washington. And it wasn’t as if she would have the physical strength to protect herself. Her wrists had been so tiny he had actually wanted to circle them between his thumb and pointer finger to see if they were as impossibly small as they looked.
And those eyes! Intensely gray, huge, fringed with the most astonishing display of natural lash he had ever seen. Her eyes had saved her from plainness.
Something about her reluctantly intrigued him—maybe the fact that she so underplayed her every asset.
What was she thinking, being alone with all that stuff in this neighborhood? Was she impossibly brave or simply stupid? Still, you had to give it to someone who was shopping around for an elf. There were probably special angels who looked after people like that.
He frowned at the thought, renegade and unwanted. He, of all people, knew there were no special angels, not for anyone. So he had obeyed Mr. Theodore. He’d come to this address thinking he was going to find someone in worse shape than him.
It obviously had not been her.
She had not been beautiful, not even pretty, really, unless he counted her eyes. He thought of them again—luminescent, brimming with a light that could almost make a man forget she was wearing a sweater just like the ones his granny used to knit. Her hair had struck him as hopelessly old-fashioned, but for some reason he’d liked it. It was just plain light brown, falling in a wave past her shoulder, no particular style.
She was one of those kind of girls he remembered only vaguely from high school—bookwormish, smart, capable…and invisible. She was not the kind who pretended fear of spiders or dropped her books coquettishly when a male of interest was in the vicinity. She did not color her hair blond or paint her lips red or have fingernails that left marks on a man’s back, her lashes would not melt when she cried.
In other words, she was not the kind of woman he knew the first thing about.
Nor did he want to, though that fleeting thought of her fingernails and his back made him shiver, which was startling. He had not reacted to a woman in a very long time. He had probably never reacted to a woman who was anything like her: understated, intelligent, pure.
Women, he reminded himself, took energy. He had none. It was that simple.
And a woman like that one manning the Secret Santa Society office would take more energy than most because despite her plainness, those multifaceted eyes made him suspect a very complicated nature. Deep. Sensitive. Intelligent. Funny.
It annoyed him that he was even thinking of her. His assignment, if he could call it that, was to find someone in worse pain than himself.
Not Ms. Secret Santa, obviously, hunting for elves and brimming with faith that her good deeds alone could protect her from this neighborhood.
But there were kids out there who needed jackets, and the first true cold snap of the year had arrived. He wondered what kind of pain it caused a parent who was not to be able to buy a jacket for a child who was cold.
Not worse pain than his own, different pain than his own.
Maybe that was why Mr. Theodore had sent him, knowing there would be something here to keep him distracted as Christmas approached. Christmas, a time of family. A time of pain for families who had nothing.
And for a guy who had nothing instead of a family.
He drew his breath in sharply, forced himself to focus. It was one day at a time, one step at a time, one task at a time. Right now, his task was fifty jackets and an elf. Michael shook his head like a boxer who had been sucker punched.
It seemed like the most unlikely lifeline, but it was the only one he was being offered, and if he didn’t find something to give a damn about, and soon, that question was going to burn a little deeper into him.
How will I survive?
His world gone. Nothing left of it. The snow swirled around him, and he realized he should be cold, but he didn’t get cold anymore. Twice a year, he’d given up carpentry. The whole family put their lives on hold and headed to Alaska for the crab fishery.
After surviving six hours in the icy, gray waters of the Bering Sea, Michael did not get cold anymore. Or really ever warm, either. He was stuck in a place where it was neither hot nor cold. Purely a place of survival.
He focused on the task at hand, just as at Mr. Theodore’s house he focused only on what was in front of him: broken stairs, a rotten window casing, a leaky faucet. There were many ways to shut off the human mind. He stopped at the nearest phone booth. Most of the telephone book was gone, but his righteousness was being rewarded today. The clothing section of the yellow pages was intact.
But then he realized he wasn’t quite sure what he wanted. Big coats or small coats? Boys or girls? What about babies? Styles? Sizes?
He glanced back down the street. He could go ask her exactly what she wanted, but he didn’t want to. He found himself wanting to surprise her, because it had been clear from the look on her face she had no expectations of him at all. She didn’t even think he’d be back. Maybe didn’t even want him to come back, which was not the normal reaction he got from women.
And he still had that option, of not going back, of leaving that strangely engaging encounter one hundred percent behind him. Looking at coats some little kids needed might make him feel something, in fact he felt jumpy thinking about it. How could he do an assignment like this and not be touched in some way? It was a fact the crafty Mr. Theodore had probably already considered!
Didn’t Mr. Theodore know that if the dam inside of Michael ever broke open, the torrent would be dangerous and destructive, wrecking everything in its path?
No. He could not go shopping for coats. But, on the other hand, fifty kids without coats? He swore under his breath, and the word came out in a frosty puff that reminded him how cold it was getting. Michael realized he could not not go shopping for coats.
He said the word again, and realized it was not an appropriate word for an emissary of the Secret Santa Society, not even an unofficial one.
Michael looked again at the pretty much demolished phone book and guiltily tore out one of the few remaining pages, the one that listed coats on it. And then he tore out the preceding one, as well, the one that listed clowns. Clowns were related to elves, weren’t they?
Guilt, he thought with surprise. That was a feeling of sorts, the first one he’d had in a long time.
Unless he could count what he felt talking to Ms. Santa back there.
Not actual warmth, but a remembrance of warmth. A remembrance of what it was to want something. What had he wanted? He frowned. To connect with her. To share a little normal, everyday banter with another human being. He’d liked making her blush. It had been amusing.
It had been a long, long time since he had felt even the smallest shiver of interest in anything or anyone. So here he was less than an hour into his mysterious assignment, and having feelings sneak up on him.
But was it going to be enough to save him? Or would it destroy what was left of him? He decided to have a little tiny bit of faith, and realized with a sigh that was another concept that had been foreign to his world for a long, long time.
Well, he thought, if a man starts messing with the spirit of Santa, some surprising things were going to happen. That was a given.
He found the address he had ripped out of the phone book. It was in a different world than the office of the Secret Santa Society, part of a brightly lit strip mall that housed upscale factory outlets on the edge of a neighborhood where the houses started in the half-million-dollar range. The Christmas displays were up in the windows, and lights blinked cheer against the colorlessness of the day.
He entered a store called West Coats. More Christmas: a tree decorated totally in white, updated versions of carols blaring from a public address system. He hated this.
Then he was nearly bowled over by a salesclerk who was exactly his type. Blond, tall, willowy, her lipstick a perfect match for her fingernails, a red Santa hat at a jaunty angle on her head. Her tag said her name was Calypso.
The woman at the Secret Santa Society had not been wearing a name tag. He realized he had not asked her name. He bet it would be a good, sturdy, practical name like Helen or Susan or Gwen.
“I need fifty kids’ coats,” he told Calypso, who leaned way toward him and gave him a look at the top of her lacy bra. Red, to match her hat. The surprising thing happened: not one vision of her fingernails and his back, no matter how hard he tried to conjure it.
“Fifty coats!” She giggled and blinked her heavily madeup lashes. Considering how he was freshly aware of wanting to connect, he was now aware of not wanting to connect with her in more than a businesslike way.
Somehow, painfully, he managed to pick out fifty children’s coats. He wanted practical coats that would keep them warm and survive snowball fights and the making of forts and snow angels. He picked out coats in as many different sizes and colors as he could find. He tossed onto his growing stack a few little sleeping bags with hoods, which Calypso cooed over and called bunting bags.
And at the last minute, hesitating, he chose three little pink princess jackets with fur collars and cuffs on them. They felt in his hands the same way those dolls had—foreign, fragile, too delicate. He knew they were totally impractical. And yet he could not put them back.
“There,” he said, “Done.”
“What do you want all these coats for?” Calypso asked.
He was afraid if he explained his mission it would just bring more cooing, so he only shrugged.
“I can get you a discount if it’s for a charity,” she said.
“No, it’s okay.” He was aware as he passed her his credit card that this was the first time he had enjoyed one single cent of all that money, huge state-of-the-art plasma television set included.
She insisted on helping him carry the coats out to his car, even though he tried to discourage her.
“Oh,” she breathed when she saw the car. “A Jaguar.”
He saw his appeal to her had just intensified. Once upon a time, he would have played that for all it was worth. He had a sharp memory of all the times he and Brian had cruised in this car…
“It’s my brother’s car,” he said abruptly.
With his car so stuffed with coats he could no longer see out his back window, he was aware Calypso was still standing there, hugging herself against the cold. All those coats and she hadn’t put one on?
She was waiting for something, so he said, “I don’t suppose you’d know where I can find an elf?”
She popped her gum and settled a hand on a cocked hip. “Ooh,” she said playfully, “I wouldn’t have figured you for kinky.”
For some reason he thought of another woman. And her blush. A woman who probably wouldn’t use the word kinky with a man even if she’d known him for fifty years, never mind for a little over an hour. A woman who probably wouldn’t know the difference between a Jaguar and a Honda Civic.
A red fingernailed hand—an exact match for the hat and bra—was laid on his jacket sleeve.
“I’m available for dinner,” Calypso announced, her voice sultry and her made-up eyes inviting.
She was exactly the kind of woman he’d always gone for. A girl who knew how to have a good time and who knew exactly how the game was played. If he was really going to start connecting again, if he was really ready, Calypso would be a safe way to do it.
Again, he thought of another woman. One who wouldn’t have announced she was available for dinner if she’d gone four days without food.
And suddenly he found himself wondering if she was.
He wanted to find out if her name was Anne or Mary or Rose. Surely, for fifty jackets, she’d surrender her name. He couldn’t wait to see her face when she saw the pink ones with the silly collars.
“Thanks for all your help. Sorry, no, I’m not available for dinner.”
“How about your brother?” she said, running a covetous finger over the sleek blackness of the hood detail.
He did not risk evoking her sympathy by telling her his brother was dead. He forced a smile, but he felt like a wolf, baring its teeth in warning. “He isn’t available, either.”
She took it in stride, a woman who knew men were just like buses—another one would be along in a few minutes—winked at him and walked away putting lots of swish in it.
Michael put the car in gear and started driving back across town. Rush hour had begun with a vengeance, the still thickly falling snow not helping. He found himself in a tangle of cars on West Washington, glaring at his watch, thinking, She’ll have gone home by the time I get there.
The traffic finally started moving, inching along through the streets made treacherous with melting snow. He reached for the heater, turned it up a notch.
And then his hand fell away, and he contemplated what he had just done. Why had he turned up the heat? The windshield was clearly defrosting adequately.
When he focused, sure enough, there it was. The tiniest shiver along his spine. He realized he was feeling something. Cold. He felt just a tiny bit cold. He’d been getting warnings all afternoon that something was in movement. The guilt over tearing the pages from the telephone book. Enjoying spending the money on the coats. The desire to connect with her. Now this.
The shiver was already gone, and he deliberately turned the heat back down. He wasn’t ready to feel anything. He certainly wasn’t ready to go invite some woman he barely knew—he didn’t even know her name, for God’s sake—to have dinner with him.
He could send the coats to the Secret Santa Society by courier tomorrow. He could find her a damned elf without ever seeing her again, without immersing himself any further in this dangerous world that would make him feel.
He slammed on the brakes, slid, used the power of the slide to yank on the wheel and do a complete U-turn, dramatic, worthy of Hollywood. Horns honked their outrage. He didn’t care. He was heading away from the Secret Santa Society as fast as he could!
Because his side and rear windows were nearly completely blocked with children’s coats, he heard the siren before he saw the lights. Michael looked in his side mirror and sighed. The red and blue lights were flashing right behind him, and when he pulled over, the police car did, too.
The cop was not in the Christmas spirit. “That turn back there was illegal—even if you could see, which you can’t.” Out came the ticket book. And then he looked more closely at Michael’s cargo.
“What is this? You rob a store?”
It would be so easy to say yes, and see where that led.
“You got a receipt for this stuff?”
Michael passed him the receipt.
“Okay, so you bought fifty kids’ coats. What’s up with that?”
The cop didn’t look like he was in the mood for the none-of-your-business that Michael wanted to give him. In fact, the man was trying very hard not to look as cold and miserable as he obviously was.
Suddenly it seemed like it was the right thing to do to let him know good happened in the world, too. It wasn’t all drunks hitting their wives and kids, dope dealers on the corners, asses doing U-turns.
“The coats are for the Secret Santa Society.” Michael offered it up reluctantly, the man who least wanted to be seen as a do-gooder.