Under The Mistletoe

When Hadley shook her head, Gabe shifted closer to her and tucked in the blanket more tightly. Even through the thick wool, his touch made her dizzy.

Gabe leaned closer to her. “It’s your call. Do we go on, or do we stop here?”

She needed to tell him to go back. But when he reached out to trace his fingertips up the line of her jaw and curl them around the nape of her neck, it was already far too late.

She was sinking slowly. There was every reason to avoid this, and she couldn’t make herself even try. She felt his breath before she ever felt a touch. When his mouth fused to hers it seemed inevitable. His lips were cool at first from the frozen night, and then she felt the heat. She could have held out against demand, but his touch was more an invitation.

And it made her want more.

Dear Reader,

If you’re eagerly anticipating holiday gifts we can start you off on the right foot, with six compelling reads by authors established and new. Consider it a somewhat early Christmas, Chanukah or Kwanzaa present!

The gifting begins with another in USA TODAY bestselling author Susan Mallery’s DESERT ROGUES series. In The Sheik and the Virgin Secretary a spurned assistant decides the only way to get over a soured romance is to start a new one-with her prince of a boss (literally). Crystal Green offers the last installment of MOST LIKELY TO… with Past Imperfect, in which we finally learn the identity of the secret benefactor—as well as Rachel James’s parentage. Could the two be linked? In Under the Mistletoe, Kristin Hardy’s next HOLIDAY HEARTS offering, a by-the-book numbers cruncher is determined to liquidate a grand New England hotel…until she meets the handsome hotel manager determined to restore it to its glory days—and capture her heart in the process! Don’t miss Her Special Charm, next up in Marie Ferrarella’s miniseries THE CAMEO. This time the finder of the necklace is a gruff New York police detective-surely he can’t be destined to find love with its Southern belle of an owner, can he? In Diary of a Domestic Goddess by Elizabeth Harbison, a woman who is close to losing her job, her dream house and her livelihood finds she might be able to keep all three—if she can get close to her hotshot new boss who’s annoyingly irresistible. And please welcome brand-new author Loralee Lillibridge—her debut book, Accidental Hero, features a bad boy come home, this time with scars, an apology-and a determination to win back the woman he left behind!

So celebrate! We wish all the best of everything this holiday season and in the New Year to come.

Happy reading,

Gail Chasan

Senior Editor

Under the Mistletoe

Kristin Hardy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Paul Ronty Jr. and Martha Wilson

of the Mount Washington Hotel

for their time and generosity

and

to Stephen—

this love will last

KRISTIN HARDY

has always wanted to write, starting her first novel while still in grade school. Although she became a laser engineer by training, she never gave up her dream of being an author. In 2002, her first completed manuscript, My Sexiest Mistake, debuted in Harlequin’s Blaze line; it was subsequently made into a movie by the Oxygen network. The author of nine books to date, Kristin lives in New Hampshire with her husband and collaborator.

Dear Reader,

I first got the idea for Under the Mistletoe a couple of years ago while taking my parents on a leaf-peeping trip through northern New Hampshire. I brought them to one of my favorite places, the Mount Washington Hotel, a hundred-year-old grand resort hotel in the White Mountains. One night, I was walking through the lobby past the walk-in granite fireplace and I had this flash of a couple in love, waltzing before the fireplace on Christmas Eve—and Under the Mistletoe was born.

I modeled the Hotel Mount Jefferson in Under the Mistletoe on the Mount Washington. You can see for yourself, if you’re lucky. Please see my Web site—www.kristinhardy.com—for details about an exciting contest I’m holding!

I’d love to hear what you think of Hadley and Gabe’s story, so please drop me a line at kristin@kristinhardy.com. And stop by my Web site for future contests, details on upcoming books, recipes and more.

Happy holidays.

Kristin Hardy

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Prologue

Manhattan, August 2005

“Because I didn’t meet the Wall Street number?” Hadley Stone stared at her father incredulously.

Robert Stone looked back with the same mix of dispassionate censure he’d offered her most of her life. “The stock price of Stone Enterprises has dropped two dollars since the earnings release for Becheron Minerals. That division was the highest profile buy we made last year. Your job was to turn it around.”

“I did turn it around,” she protested. “We beat our in-house earnings target.”

“But Wall Street expected you to do better.”

What the hell did a bunch of Wall Street analysts know about the inside dealings of their company? Hadley thought furiously, remembering the hours she’d spent flying halfway around the world to various Becheron facilities, the countless jet-lagged meetings while she struggled to bring the shaky mining company back from the brink of bankruptcy to meet the punishingly high profit margins demanded by Stone Enterprises. And now, to be told that the division was being taken out of her hands because she hadn’t met the inflated expectations of Wall Street analysts?

Grimly, she shoved the frustration down. Showing emotion to Robert Stone was an invitation to be totally discounted. “I know Becheron inside out,” she said instead. “You put someone else in there, it’ll take them a month just to get up to speed.”

“Eliot Ketchum’s taking over. I’m sure he’ll be quite capable.”

“So I’m demoted?”

“Think of it as a reassignment. It was my error to push you too far, too fast.”

Protesting that it wasn’t fair would fall on deaf ears, she knew from experience. Her big opportunity, she’d delivered the goods and all she’d earned was a smack down.

The frown on Robert’s face softened. “It’s not your last chance, Hadley. You know I have big plans for you at Stone. I always have.”

Since toddlerhood, to be exact. For as long as she could remember, he’d orchestrated her life—her school, her friends, her career. Relentless standards, unyielding discipline and occasional and unpredictable praise, doled out just often enough to make her knock herself out to earn more. Another child might have rebelled. Hadley only worked harder to be the heir Robert wanted, a stand-in for the son he’d never had.

To be what he wanted? For the umpteenth time of late, she wondered if that were even possible. She didn’t want to go there, though—couldn’t, not after spending twenty-eight years of her life trying to please him.

Robert’s intercom buzzed. “Who is it, Ruth?” he asked.

“Justin Palmer, to talk with you about the W. S. Industries restructuring.”

“Send him in.” Robert clicked off the intercom and looked at Hadley. “I’ll be with you in just a minute. WSI takes precedence.”

Indeed. Everyone at Stone Enterprises was dying to know just what Robert Stone planned to do with the company of Whit Stone, his bitterest rival—and the father he’d been estranged from since childhood. Robert had labored all his professional life to outdo Whit and to destroy him financially. In the end, he’d been unequal to the task. Whit had died with his holdings stronger than ever. To have the point rammed home by Whit leaving him the entire conglomerate had to be burning her father up.

Not that Hadley was about to ask.

The graying, hawk-faced legal counsel of Stone Enterprises handed a bound report to Robert and took a seat in one of the plush leather client chairs. “WSI, in a nutshell. You’ve got the preliminary assessment of holdings, value, et cetera. It’s all in agreement with the estate declaration, though slightly over-valued by my estimate.” He smiled faintly.

“Any surprises?”

“Not really. Most of it is a matter of public record.”

“The list of underperformers is longer than I’d expected.” An expression of satisfaction spread across Robert’s face. “Do you think they were cooking the books?”

“Unlikely. If you flip to the page of overall holdings, you’ll see that those are a minority.”

Robert nodded. “I don’t care. We need rid of them.”

“I’ll notify mergers and acquisitions to get on it.”

“You misunderstand me. I don’t want them sold off whole. Take them apart and sell them off piecemeal.”

Palmer stared at him. “Robert, about seventy percent of the companies on that list are running in the black and another twenty are looking at profitability within a five-year time horizon. You run them all through a chop shop, you’re going to lose value and revenue.”

“It’ll lower the hit from the estate taxes.” Stone flipped closed the briefing book. “Get our salvage specialists to work on it. I want those companies to be history within the month.”

“I don’t think we can entirely execute on that.”

Robert’s brows lowered. The only occasions Hadley had ever seen him lose an iota of his iron control involved his father. “I don’t want to hear arguments, Justin. I want to hear ’yes.’”

“How about ’the terms of the will won’t allow it’?”

“Explain.”

“Your father’s will identifies one holding that cannot be sold or dismantled. It has to be held by the Stone family and run in good faith or else the entire estate reverts to charity.”

Hadley watched, fascinated. After years of being the puppet master, Robert was now a puppet himself. And not even he could walk away from thirty billion dollars for the sake of principle.

“What is the business?”

“An old hotel up in New Hampshire.”

“What the hell would he want with a hotel?” Robert demanded. “He specialized in high tech and industrial manufacturing, not hospitality.”

“I get the impression he dealt in whatever he wanted to.”

“And Stone Enterprises deals in what I want to,” Stone said icily. “Find a way to break the terms.”

Palmer shook his head. “We’ve been over and over it. It’s ironclad. You can do what you want with the rest, Robert, but this one has to stay in the family.”

Robert’s jaw tightened visibly. Long seconds passed while Hadley waited for the explosion. Finally, he relaxed a fraction, the struggle for control won yet again. “All right. If we can’t unload it, then we need to turn around the earnings. I won’t have this kind of an operation showing up on our financials.”

“We’ll need to put someone else on it in a hurry.”

“I know.” Robert turned to Hadley. “Well, it looks like that new opportunity I was telling you about has cropped up sooner than I expected. Get the Becheron transfer rolling. You’re going to New Hampshire.”

Chapter One

New Hampshire, December 2005

Opportunity, her father had said. More like banishment, Hadley thought, as she swung into a curve on the narrow road that threaded through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. From vice president of one of the most high profile divisions at Stone to triage specialist for an antiquated hotel out in the sticks with the squirrels and chipmunks. Forget the flights to Zurich, Cape Town and BuenosAires. Now it was Montpelier, Vermont, which was still nearly an hour and a half from the hotel. No direct flights there, of course, which had meant cooling her heels in Boston while she’d waited for a connection on some crop duster.

After all, demoted V.P.s didn’t rate the corporate jet.

Her cell phone rang and she answered it absently. “Hello?”

“Good morning, sweetheart,” said a voice filled with perfume and gardenias and air kisses.

“Hello, Mother.”

“Can you stop by the house before you leave so we can talk about the holidays?”

Hadley resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Too late. I’m already here.”

“The wilds of Maine?”

“New Hampshire.”

“Ah. And how is New Hampshire?”

“Cold,” she answered. “Lots of trees and snow.”

“Sounds wonderfully rustic. Your father seems to think you’ll be gone for a while. At least through the holidays.”

Nice that he had such faith in her. “We’ll see how it goes. I should be able to take a day or two over Christmas, anyway.”

“Actually, that was why I called.” Irene hesitated. “You see, we’re going to Gstaad over the holidays. The twins are mad for the idea.”

Eight hours of flying each way, not counting time spent on the ground. “Sounds great,” Hadley said slowly, “but I don’t think I can take that much time off right now. Any chance of going after Christmas?”

“Well, the twins really want to be there for the holiday. A bunch of their friends are planning a big party and they don’t want to miss it.” Hadley could imagine the spark in her mother’s eyes on the other end of the phone. “And next year the girls will be in their debutante season, so we can’t possibly go then. This is really our only chance.”

Debutante season? “Sure, the debutante season,” Hadley said, biting back a sigh. “No problem.”

“Oh, and if you’re trying to think of something to get them, they’ve been absolutely crazed for those new Louis Vuitton bags, the ones with the cherries.”

Hadley looked at the pine covered mountains around her. “I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“Wonderful. Anyway, I should let you go—I know you’re busy. I’ll call you before we leave.”

“All right. Love you, Mom.”

“Love you, too, dear.”

And the line went silent, leaving Hadley with another unsettling reminder that when it came to the Stone girls, there were her mother’s twins and her father’s daughter. They shared the same wheat-colored hair and gray eyes, the same delicate features that Hadley often thought put her at a disadvantage in business. They’d grown up in the same household.

And yet not. Robert had taken command of Hadley’s life early. Perhaps it was only human nature that when Irene Stone finally gave birth to the twins, she’d made them hers. It became more apparent each time Hadley saw them that her mother and the twins inhabited an entirely different world than the one she lived in. Theirs revolved around shopping and hairstyles and parties, all the things Hadley had never had time for. All the things her mother loved.

And every time she talked with her mother, that world seemed farther and farther away.

Enough! It wasn’t a crisis. They had plans for Christmas and she was a grown woman with a job to get done.

Checking her directions, she turned onto the highway that led to the hotel—if you could call the pockmarked asphalt that threaded through even denser forest a highway.

She could tell the first problem with the Hotel Mount Jefferson sight unseen—location. Skiers and hikers, the people most likely to go to the mountains for recreation, were not the kinds of people to pay a bundle for a glorified bed-and-breakfast. They were far more likely to camp out or, if they had the kind of money that the hotel hoped to attract, choose the stylish condos she’d passed a couple of miles back. How, then, was she supposed to meet her father’s astronomical expectations?

Hadley’s hands tightened on the wheel. Instead of running a division with seven locations, three business units and a head count of more than two thousand, she was now responsible for turning around a superannuated hotel with a few hundred employees, most of whom were probably missing teeth.

Evaluate, set a strategy and implement it, her father had directed her. Double the profit margin within six months, quadruple it within twelve.

If she had any sense, she’d tell him to go jump in a lake. After all, she had choices. She could update her résumé and shop it around. But who out there would hire her without worrying she was a mole for Stone Enterprises? And Robert Stone was a jealous god. When you left his world, he made sure the departure was permanent—home would be home to her no longer. Did she want that? Could she give that up?

Hadley sighed. She didn’t want to be in this car, on this road, heading for oblivion. But she didn’t really have a choice, not when she thought about it. No, her only real option was to do the job, give Robert what he wanted. So she kept driving to the Hotel Mount Jefferson, a place in all likelihood few people other than the misbegotten souls who worked there cared about, she was sure.

Misbegotten souls who were about to get a big surprise.

“You’re kidding.” Gabriel Trask stared at Mona Landry, his head of housekeeping. “No water in the entire laundry room?”

The stout woman glowered. “Burst pipe. Apparently laundry wasn’t a priority when they redid the plumbing last spring.”

“Burke?” Gabe turned to his head of facilities.

He spread his hands. “We only have so many months to work with. Guests come first. I was planning to run new pipe out to the facilities building this spring.”

“And what are the guests going to say when they don’t have any clean sheets or towels?” Mona asked tartly.

“Mona.” Gabe raised his hand. “We’ve got a problem to address. Let’s fix it. Burke, have you isolated the break?”

“I’ve dug a couple of sample holes. As near as I can tell, the pipe out to the laundry plant is split. Frost heaves.”

“As near as you can tell?”

“We’re still trying to dig down to it.”

Gabe frowned. “It shouldn’t be that hard.”

“Frozen ground. Winter staffing levels. Plus it’s ten degrees out there and dropping. We can only keep the guys outside for short stretches.”

Gabe nodded. If he cursed a blue streak in his head, it was nobody’s business but his own. “How long?”

“We’re working on it. No later than tomorrow afternoon. I’d like to repair the whole line while we’re at it. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of time until this happens again.”

Not what Gabe wanted to hear at the start of a heavily booked weekend. “Mona, how’s our linen supply look?”

“Enough for today and maybe half of the rooms tomorrow. After that…” She shrugged. “I keep telling you we need more.”

New linens, new plumbing, new pillars to replace the rotting ones on the west porch, new carpeting in the ballroom.

Old budget. When his coal-dark hair eventually turned gray, he’d know where to place the blame. Gabe suppressed a sigh. “All right, we go to the laundry in Montpelier. Mona, get the number from Susan. One of the grounds guys can truck it over.”

“Not if you want that trench dug,” Burke reminded him. Gabe closed his eyes a second. “Right. Okay, find a bell hop but get on it now. We need the laundry to turn the job around by the end of the day.” Pulling from the bell staff would leave them short up front during checkout, but they’d manage.

If necessary, he’d drive the damn truck himself.

Trees, unending trees. Hadley yawned. No wonder she was in a bad mood. Taking the morning flight out had sounded good when she’d bought the ticket. It had only been when the alarm sounded at five that she’d realized she’d been out of her mind to book it. When she got to the hotel she could give them their first test—how they dealt with grumpy early arrivals.

She swung the sporty little rental car into another curve, and the line of trees fell away, revealing the valley ahead.

And her jaw dropped.

The Hotel Mount Jefferson perched on the hillside like a white castle, a sprawling fantasy of turrets and porticos. The roof glowed red under the rays of the winter sun. Flags atop the towers snapped in the breeze. Hadley could practically see women in pale Victorian gowns and parasols promenading along the veranda that ran the length of the building. A snow-covered hillside rolled away from the hotel. It would be green in summer, she thought, green and magical.

The pictures hadn’t done it justice. She’d done her homework, of course. She knew the financials by heart, understood that it wasn’t just a little mountain lodge. But she hadn’t been at all prepared for a place that looked as though stepping through the doors would be to walk back in time. For a place that instantly made her think of ball gowns and afternoon teas, of hot toddies sipped by a roaring fire.

She hadn’t been prepared to be enchanted.

This isn’t about enchantment, she could practically hear Robert saying. It’s about business.

And with that the enchantment dropped away. How did they heat that many rooms, no doubt drafty after withstanding nearly a hundred winters? Radiators, probably. Radiators installed by Civil War veterans. How often did the radiators break down? Hadley sighed. However enchanting the hotel was on the outside, she had to meet her numbers or else she’d be in exile a whole lot longer than she’d like. And even enchantment got old.

She considered her strategy. Come in like an ordinary guest and spend the weekend looking for ways to economize, ways to increase occupancy. Shameless romance was one angle to play, she mused as she drove past the white, Victorian-style lampposts that marched up the access road to the hotel. Hopefully, they had an in-house consultant for that part, because that one she was going to have to delegate.

At the pillared portico of the hotel, Hadley paused for a moment. Up close, the Hotel Mount Jefferson was all her first glimpse had promised. The front facade of the building gleamed with broad windows. Marble steps led up to a green-carpeted porch where a small fleet of shiny brass luggage racks held the bags of departing guests. To one side sat an antique sleigh, painted gleaming red. Christmas was drawing near and whoever ran the place was laying it on just right, she admitted.

The valet opened her door. “Welcome to the Hotel Mount Jefferson. May I get your bags?”

“In the trunk.”

“Very good.” He passed her a green ticket in trade for her keys. “If you’ll just call this number when you get to your room, we’ll have your bags brought right up for you.”

Hadley walked up the steps and over to the sleigh. The cut glass lamps reflected the daylight, the brass fittings gleamed. Someone at the hotel paid attention to detail, she thought, tracing the graceful curve of the front panel. Someone knew the little things counted.

A smiling doorman in a caped greatcoat opened the wide white front door with its curling brass handles. “Welcome, miss,” he said, tipping his cap. Hadley stepped through the door and straight back to the turn of the previous century.

For a moment, she simply stopped and stared, carried back to a time when the world was a slower, more graceful place. Nineteen oh three, or so her research said. From where she stood, the lobby seemed to stretch the entire length of the east wing of the building, all space and light, airy and open. Ornate white pillars soared to the coffered ceiling twenty feet overhead, their inset panels gleaming with gold luster, capitals at the top curling elegantly. Overhead, bronze-and-crystal chandeliers threw a warm glow that competed with the sunlight spilling in the enormous picture windows.