Visions of Sugar Plums
Author: Kristine Grayson
Date: 2013-09-25 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction
Description: Nissa Kealoha helps control Santa's image-his brand. An Image Specialist with Claus & Company, she helps promote his positive image and deflect anything negative. This year, Nissa finds herself counting the days until she can return to the Greater World to goose holiday donations and remind people about the good Santa represents. Until a man on a mission threatens her holiday plans.Professor Ryan Palmer possesses the perfect voice in the perfect body. And he uses that perfection to launch an anti-obesity campaign against, of all people, Santa. Or as he sees it, Santa's image. Ryan thinks the m
Publisher: WMG Publishing

Copyright Information

The Santa Series

Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing

Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Wavebreakmediamicro/Dreamstime

Up on the Rooftop copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Published by WMG Publishing. Cover art copyright © Wavebreakmediamicro/Dreamstime.

Visions of Sugar Plums copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Published by WMG Publishing. Cover art copyright © Victoriaandreas/Dreamstime.

Dressed in Holiday Style copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Published by WMG Publishing. Cover art copyright © Nicoletaionescu/Dreamstime.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Contents

Introduction

Up on the Rooftop

Visions of Sugar Plums

Dressed in Holiday Style

Newsletter Signup

About the Author

More Books by Kristine Grayson

Copyright Information

Kristine Grayson’s popular Santa Series—Up on the Rooftop, Visions of Sugar Plums and Dressed in Holiday Style—together in one volume.

The magic of Christmas takes a lot to pull off, even for Santa. Enter the elves and humans of Claus & Company, who help Santa make the big day happen.

But any time an elf or member of Santa’s family walks among the mortals of the Greater World, risk follows. The risk of discovery. The risk of failure. And most of all, the risk of falling in love.

Bestselling author Kristine Grayson makes Christmas magic with these three stories of holiday romance—no mistletoe required.

1

JULKA STOOD ON the roof, hands on her hips, feet covered in snow. She was tired, she was cold, and she hadn’t felt the tip of her nose in hours. She was staring at yet another fancy-pants chimney, a narrow little pipe sticking up out of a lovely square pile of fake bricks, and she wanted to kick it.

Which wasn’t very festive of her.

But seriously, who felt festive on October 30th? It was New England, for heavens sake. There wasn’t supposed to be snow for another—oh, what? Two weeks? She really didn’t know, except that she had checked the records going back to the 19th century, and never found a snowfall as deep as this one before Halloween. She wasn’t supposed to be this cold for another month, and by then, she should’ve been moving south. Where she would have to deal with freezing fog, sleet, and sheets of ice.

Oh, joy. Ho-ho-ho and all that.

It was her own damn fault that she was standing here. She was the one who had said, I don’t have the skills to run a workshop, but I can find problems and solve them.

And then, of course, she had to go too far, because she always went too far: Besides, I don’t want to stay here for my entire life. I’d like to travel. I need to see the world. I really, really do.

She sighed. When she had said she wanted to see the world, she had hoped she would be placed in one of the many year-round outposts. She would receive toy shipments, interview local children, and make certain that the back-up sleighs were in fantastic shape. She would scout local products and find great toy factories that didn’t even know they would be enlisted.

She had wanted to be one of the Ambassadors for Santa’s massive worldwide operation.

She hadn’t meant that she wanted to be a minion in Entry Access Quality Control, someone who had to view each and every house with children in it for the appropriate entrance. Appropriate, in Santa’s rather medieval mind, always meant a chimney.

She sighed and clutched the tablet to her chest. It was a real paper tablet—one of the millions of Big Chief tablets that someone in Santa’s North Pole headquarters had stocked up on in the 1960s, along with stubby Number 2 pencils that she refused to use.

She wanted an electronic tablet—a gizmo, with bells and whistles and access to the worldwide web (even though, she’d been told, no one called it that any more). The workshop had hundreds of those as well, but not for the elves or the human support staff, but for the tech-savvy children who didn’t want a dolly or a train set, but who wanted the latest in computer gadgetry.

Everyone at the North Pole had to be careful with gadgetry. Many types of magic—particularly fairy tale magic—weren’t compatible with electronics. Elven magic also had difficulty with electronics. Santa always had the Fairy Kingdoms design his systems, and that didn’t always work well.

Delbert popped his head out of the invisible sleigh. She hated the effect. It made him look like he’d been beheaded, and she had gotten stuck with the head part. She wondered what the civilians on the ground saw. Whatever it was, it couldn’t’ve been pretty.

Entry Access Quality Control wasn’t supposed to call attention to itself. That was why the invisible sleigh, which was the same size and shape as Santa’s (only without the reindeer; they hadn’t needed reindeer since 1930 or so, but they kept the reindeer for form’s sake. Besides, the reindeer had a hell of a union).

Delbert usually remained invisible as well. He was an S-Elf, sharing a lineage with Santa. Delbert hated his heritage, and would’ve fled long ago except that he couldn’t hide who he was, no matter how much he wanted to. All those photos of Santa vacationing on the beach, of Santa in Hawaii in the summer or lounging in Monte Carlo instead of driving his sleigh—well, they weren’t Santa.

They were usually Delbert.

And as punishment for tarnishing the Santa brand, he had to spend one year on Entry Access Quality Control.

“Well,” Delbert said, “do I have to put my boots on?”

“No,” Julka said sourly. He might have been punished by doing Entry Access Quality Control, but she was the one who suffered. She inspected, kicked, shook, and fought with more chimneys than she wanted to consider. Yes, she had the best boots and gloves that magic could conjure, but she still got cold and wet and grumpy.

Delbert only had to emerge when there was a likely chimney, which there hadn’t been all day.

The rules of Entry Access Quality Control were pretty simple: if the chimney didn’t work, and the skylight looked too dicey, then Santa got to use any available door. And Delbert didn’t have to check the doors. With the growing obesity problem worldwide, the entire slew of Santa Advance Teams no longer had to worry about doorways being too narrow for the Jolly Old Elf.

“I’ll boil up some lunch then,” Delbert said. “You gonna want any?”

“No, thanks.” She couldn’t stomach a second day of Peppermint Veal Stew, even if the elves did think it a delicacy. Her stomach didn’t. Neither did her taste buds. That was the other problem of traveling with elves. They preferred sweet foods to almost everything else, turning the most disgusting things into candy.

She’d grown up with it, but that didn’t mean she liked it. After the last few days, she deserved something made here in the Greater World, not that it was greater than the North Pole’s magical universe. The Greater World was just bigger—and lacked the magic.

Which she was really beginning to appreciate.

Because magic—what little of it she had—was making her cold.

2

MARSHALL COLLIER SHADED his eyes with his right hand, and looked up at the roof. It wasn’t a trick of the light. He was seeing a slight figure holding some kind of notebook kick a chimney. Tiny runnels of snow trickled down the side of the rooftop, like the precursors of an avalanche.

Or at least, a severe loss of roof-snow that would ruin the shoveling work he had managed earlier this morning.

Marshall had a narrow flatbed truck that could hold a small Caterpillar tractor with a large shovel on the end, and two different size snow blowers. He also had real honest-to-God shovels tucked into the back and three changes of clothing, including pairs of boots.

He’d been out clearing side streets and sidewalks since 5 a.m, calling the power company every two blocks or so to report downed lines, and doing his best to be a Good Samaritan.

This freak pre-Halloween blizzard, and his parka, had given him a kind of anonymity that he hadn’t had since the Great Recession began. It hadn’t mattered that he hadn’t worked for the fraudulent companies that caused the meltdown. What mattered was that he had made a lot of money (too much money) as an investment banker and venture capitalist. It also didn’t matter that he had retired from that business in 2007 at the age of 34. What seemed to matter to all these folks who were struggling to pay their now-overpriced mortgages on their meager unemployment benefits, was that he had once worked in that industry, and that meant he was one step above Satan.

And maybe he was. When he worked in the industry, he hadn’t thought that there were actual people behind the numbers. He wasn’t a sales guy. He had been an analysis guy. He hadn’t dealt with people; he had dealt with numbers.

As the economy tumbled into darker and darker places, he had watched the news reports with horror, realizing that each number he had played with had represented someone else’s money.

The thing was, he hadn’t been told that when he was hired straight out of Harvard. No one said a word as he had manipulated the numbers, stroked and fondled them and made them grow—legitimately—until the returns he got weren’t good enough for his bosses. They wanted him to cheat on the math. He never cheated on anything. Not on tests, not on girlfriends, and certainly not on something as important as his job.

So he got fired for not taking enough risks. But he had already taken a big risk: he had put some of his earnings into a buddy’s company. The company looked dicey from the beginning, but a friend was a friend, right? He had then invested in a few other companies, calling himself a venture capitalist, when really he was a depressed fired former investment banker.

And then his buddy’s company became a huge success. And Marshall, as one of the early investors, made a fortune.

He pulled out of the venture capital business because he didn’t want to make his fortune into an obscene fortune, especially not while his neighbors were starving. So he concentrated his efforts on helping charities become more efficient—manipulating numbers again, but for a good cause. (And giving away money.)

But he never talked about any of that, and everyone in this rather toney neighborhood thought of him as that investment banker guy. Hated, as if he had robbed all those funds all by himself.

He had no idea why he kept trying to ingratiate himself with the people in this place, but he did. He kept telling himself it was because he liked his house and he didn’t want to move—which was true—but honestly, it might’ve been because he was trying to ingratiate himself with himself. He had let himself become part of the problem, and he really hadn’t tried to implement a solution, back when there could have been one.

Guilt. It went a long way. Including getting him out at 5 a.m. on a blizzardy morning, clearing roads and driveways for people who would spit on him if they knew he was the one behind the wheel of the snow blower.

Still, six hours of work later, he was feeling pretty good. He wasn’t cold, he wasn’t wet, and he had managed to clear miles of roadway and driveway by his own rather mighty self.

Sometimes good physical labor felt a lot better than massaging numbers. Even if that meant he was seeing the same people over and over again on rooftops.

Although that wasn’t really accurate. He was seeing the same person over and over again on rooftops. She was tiny, slender, and stylish, wearing a little red cape with fur trim. (He hoped it was fake fur trim. In this neighborhood, wearing fur could get her killed.) She also had on reddish pants tucked into knee-high boots. She was wearing fur earmuffs and no gloves at all. And she looked cold.

When he had first seen her, he thought she was a child. She was so slim and so regal, and her outfit so outlandish for someone going from roof to roof, that he figured she had to be about twelve. A few houses ago, he had gotten closer, and realized if she was twelve, she should’ve been locked inside the house.

She had a curvy figure appropriate to her small size, and golden blond hair that he hadn’t seen outside of shampoo commercials. He couldn’t quite see her face, but her body language wasn’t twelve either. It was exasperated adult—or it had been, until she gave the chimney in front of her one frustrated kick.

He frowned at her. He had no idea why a woman dressed like she was heading for a Macy’s Christmas photo shoot would travel from rooftop to rooftop in a MacMansion-filled Connecticut neighborhood. Nor did he know exactly how she was doing it. Or what angered her about it so much.

He did know that he found her fascinating, from the tip of her golden hair to her impractical boots. He wondered if he should yell up at her and warn her that too many sudden movements would cause the snow to slide off the roof—and her with it.

Then she stomped away from him, toward the back of the house. She reached the peak of the roof, stepped up some kind of ladder that he couldn’t see—and vanished.

And not a wink-out disappear complete with little sparklies. Nor was it like a transporter vanish in Star Trek where the entire body fuzzed into a multicolored light show. It was as if she got swallowed by something. First her head and shoulders disappeared, along with one of her feet and an arm, then her torso, and finally the remaining foot. All that remained was a disturbance in the Force (as Obi-Wan would have said), which looked rather like a heat mirage, floating briefly next to that chimney.

Then nothing. Nothing at all. Not even the house next door. At least, not for a few seconds, anyway. It was as if someone had set up an opaque wall, designed to match the snow and the gray cloud cover (which was threatening even more ugliness).

He blinked and the neighbor’s rooftop reappeared. And so did a few more rooftops he hadn’t known were missing.

Okay, that was it. Six hours of physical labor in the cold, moving tractors and snow blowers and piles of snow, subsisting on stale (lukewarm) coffee, breakfast bars, and one apple, had not done him any good.

It was time to take a break. It was past time to take a break.

He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and headed to lunch.

3

IT HAD TAKEN Julka fifteen minutes to convince Delbert that she needed to stop at the Burger King two miles away. He just wanted to go to the next rooftop. He had some vision of getting done before nightfall. Like that was going to happen. They wouldn’t be done until the morning of December 23rd. Although to be fair, he was only referring to this town, and in this town they only had 35 houses left to go.

Besides, they had already earned hotel money. Julka liked that best of all. The teams that couldn’t get their quotas done in the time allotted had to sleep in their sleighs. But Julka and Delbert were one day ahead of schedule, partly because of the blizzard. They’d worked around it, using the North Pole Navigator to let them know when and where the worst of the weather would be. Then they would go to the safest part of their region, get the work done, and move onto another area, avoiding most of the snow the entire time.

The Burger King’s roof had been shoveled off. It had a single pipe that spewed smoke that smelled of frying beef. A gigantic Halloween pumpkin balloon had been shredded by the blizzard’s middle-of-the-night winds and hung off the roof like orange streamers. Since reddish orange was one of Burger King’s primary colors, the streamers looked planned.

Nothing else did. The parking lot was jammed. Julka had to convince Delbert to land on the nearby health club’s roof. She had hoped to land in the parking lot.

But the parking lot—which was huge—was also full.

She sat on the roof’s edge, feet crossed, watching as locals streamed into that Burger King. Rules dictated that she wait until no one was around, so that she wouldn’t be seen, which was one reason why she chose the health club’s roof. But if she waited much longer, she’d eat shingles.

A guy with a huge rig filled with all kinds of snow-moving equipment parked in the auxiliary parking lot, as far from anyone as he could get. He climbed out of his four-by-four, pushed the hood of a parka off his head, and wiped his face.

He had beautiful black hair in need of a trim. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and moved with the ease of an athlete. He didn’t look up as he walked, and she felt oddly disappointed. She wanted to see his face.

She had a feeling she’d seen him before, but she had no idea where.

She lost sight of him in the scrum of vehicles in the main parking lot. He had been the last non-magical person in her line of vision. She grinned, then launched herself off the roof.

Jumping from rooftops had not been one of her magical skills until she took this job. Then she got an augmentation just so she was protected from accidental slippage or falls of more than three feet. This was the best perk of all—that feeling of floating through a cushion of air. It made her feel like she could fly if she would only put her mind to it.

She landed on the sidewalk outside the health club. She adjusted her hair and her ear muffs, hoping she looked enough like a regular person—a regular American person—to get by.

This was the one thing she had little experience with, the one thing she valued the most: the opportunity to mingle with regular people, the kind the Pole was designed to help. She knew she could never quite blend in, but she could at least experience everything like the tourist she was, making memories, snatching moments out of other people’s every day lives and wondering what she would have been like if she had been born in New England instead of the North Pole.

She squared her shoulders, adjusted her cape, and headed for the front door.

4

NORMALLY, MARSHALL WAS a “my-body-is-my-temple” kinda guy. He watched what he ate, exercised regularly, and got enough sleep. After six hours of intensive labor in the frigid cold, he figured it wasn’t going to hurt him to eat poorly.

And he was planning to eat very poorly.

He pulled into Burger King like it was the holy of holies. He looked at that cheesy sign he usually drove past (with his head down so he didn’t have to contemplate all that burgery goodness) and reveled in the idea of a Whopper or a bacon-double cheeseburger or maybe both, along with fifteen sides of fries, and eighteen regular Cokes.

He’d spend his afternoon in the plastic seats, leaning against a faux marble table, and watching the neighborhood go by. His neighbors would shun him and treat him badly and he would have to hide behind the pieces of The New York Times someone had carelessly left lying about.

That thought—and not the fifteen orders of fries—nearly had him swerving for the drive-through.

But he hadn’t. He had forced himself to go inside.

He had never seen the Burger King so busy. People lined up five deep. Entire families huddled together, looking miserable. It wasn’t until he eavesdropped that he understood why.

Many houses in the neighborhood had no power. Burger King was the closest fast-food restaurant—any restaurant, really—with electricity. A woman behind the counter grinned tiredly at one customer, and said, “We’ve been like this all morning.”

Startled, Marshall looked at the clock. It was morning to most people. His day was half done. More than half done, really. And now that he had stopped moving, he was done in.

No wonder he’d been seeing pretty girl elves on rooftops. He was half asleep on his feet.

He ordered a Double Whopper with large fries and both Coke and coffee—the coffee for warmth.

Lucky him, he found an open table that fit two, so he didn’t feel like he was taking spots away from cold families. Everyone sounded miserable. Kids asking if they could trick or treat when the power was out; parents giving the time-honored “we’ll see” response that probably meant no. If power lines were still down, then no one was wandering neighborhoods in costume any time soon, and he doubted that anyone would have the time or the ability to set up a one-stop trick-or-treat place.

He’d never seen anything quite like it: this full blizzard so early in the season, wrecking so many plans.

“I’d blame you for this, except I, at least, know you’re not God,” said one of his neighbors, Hester Bain, as she walked by Marshall with her ten-year-old son, Nigel.

Nigel gave Marshall an apologetic glance. Marshall shrugged. Hester Bain (“That’s Mrs. Bain to you”) had been vicious to him from the moment she found out who he had been, at a neighborhood meeting from late 2008 that he still regretted—not that he went to the meeting, but that he had said, “I know a lot of those guys—I used to work in the industry—and believe me, most of them don’t have souls.”

Apparently “most of them” had applied to him too. He tried to shrug moments like this off—after all, the Bains had lost all of their life savings with one of the scam investment houses, and they had barely managed to hang onto their house—but the words still hurt.

He made himself look away from her. He didn’t want to meet anyone’s gaze. He didn’t want to provoke more comments.

Then a flash of red caught his eye. He turned toward the door, and his breath caught.

There she was: taller than he had initially thought, older too—maybe 30—with a face as stunning as her wheat-blond hair. High cheekbones, blue eyes, delicate lips—she looked like a Russian supermodel.

She also looked stunningly out of place. It wasn’t just her red cape with the fur trim and matching red pants tucked into those black leather boots. It was the happy expression on her face.

Everyone else was miserable, a bit frightened, worried about the weather and the future, and she smiled like she had entered the happiest place on Earth.

Plus it was the day before Halloween, and she looked like Santa’s Naughty Helper before the half-naked photo shoot started.

His cheeks warmed, and he forced himself to look away. He normally didn’t think of women like that, not even exceedingly pretty women. Not even exceedingly pretty women whom he found exceedingly attractive.

He could feel her nearby. He wondered if she was staring at him, then decided that he was just being silly. She hadn’t noticed him at all. In fact, if she was from the neighborhood, she probably knew what an awful person he was supposed to be and would most certainly avoid him.

At least she hadn’t been a figment of his imagination. Although that begged the question—what had she been doing on that rooftop?

Those rooftops, if he really wanted to be accurate.

He wanted to get up and ask her. He wondered how creepy that would be. Would she think he was spying on her or something?

“Pardon me,” a low female voice with an odd accent asked him.

He lifted his head, and there she was, large as life and much more fragrant. She smelled peppermint, which somehow didn’t surprise him one bit.

“Is this seat taken?” she asked softly. “It seems to be the only one available.”

“Um, sure,” he said. “I mean, no. I mean, please, sit down.”

When was the last time a woman had him tongue-tied? When was the last time he had spoken to an attractive woman? He broke up with his most recent girlfriend a year ago, he didn’t go to bars to meet women, and no one in town wanted anything to do with him. He would have had to take a train into New York City just to find a woman who didn’t mind his background.

The pretty woman smiled at him, and the entire room brightened. He was surprised that no one else seemed to notice.

“Thank you,” she said and slipped into the hard plastic chair, setting her tray down as she did. “I have wanted to come here for a long time.”

To Connecticut? To Burger King? To this Burger King? He knew she hadn’t meant the table or the spot near the window.

“I take it you’re not local,” he said, and silently cursed himself for being idiotic.

“Sadly, no,” she said. “I am only in your fair city for a few days for work. Then I move south.”

“Move south?” he asked.

She shrugged one shoulder. “My work requires that I go from place to place.”

“And your work is on…rooftops?” he asked.

She looked at him, surprised. “How do you know that?”

“I saw you today,” he said. “It’s hard to miss you in that red cape.”

She looked down at herself as if she just realized what she was wearing. “Is it inappropriate?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It is the day before Halloween. But usually people reserve their elf costumes for Christmas.”

“Elf costume?” she said in a decidedly frigid tone.

“Well, you know,” Marshall said, his cheeks getting even warmer. “The red cape, the fur, the boots…”

God, he almost blurted that she looked like Santa’s Naughty Helper, but he somehow managed to censor that statement. Still, she looked offended.

“I am not an elf,” she said.

“I-I-I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. It’s a very fetching costume.”

He sounded so lame, like some needy geek around a pretty girl. Which he was. Before he had gotten into Harvard, hell, before he had become an investment banker, long before he had money, he had been the math geek in the corner of the high school cafeteria, lost in his numbers, unable to talk to any girl he found attractive—even if (especially if) she had asked him about her math homework.

“It’s not a costume,” she said in that same frosty tone. “It’s my work outfit.”

His face probably matched her suit. He didn’t even know how to apologize without making things worse.

“Ah,” he said. “It’s just unusual to see people in red uniforms standing on rooftops in the lull of a snowstorm.”

“Oh,” she said, “the storm is over—at least here. It’s moving north and east.”

She sounded so sure of herself.

“That’s not what the weather people say.” Marshall had checked his phone twice to see the weather, wondering if his labors this morning had even been worthwhile. The weather experts seemed to believe the blizzard would continue—in one form or another—until November.

“Well, we have much more sophisticated equipment,” she said.

“We?” he asked.

She shrugged. “The people I work with. We have fantastic equipment, especially about the weather. We have to.”

Because they spent their days on rooftops? He felt confused. “I suppose I can’t ask who you work with.”

She shook her head. Her sandwich was almost gone, and he hadn’t even noticed her eating it. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

He flashed on that face he had seen on one of the rooftops—the first one?—the face that looked like a disembodied head. Was that one of her partners? Or was that a trick of the light?

He was about to ask her, when a strident female voice cut into their conversation. “I don’t know who you are, young lady, but you look nice.”

Marshall and the pretty non-elf woman looked toward the sound. It came from Mrs. Bain, two tables away, her lunch crumpled in front of her, her tray pushed to one side. Nigel had his head down, trying to finish his Whopper Jr.

Mrs. Bain leaned toward them as if she was going to speak confidentially, but she didn’t lower her voice at all.

“But,” Mrs. Bain continued, “that man is one of those bankers who steals from people. He’s not the sort of person you should idly converse with. He’s despicable.”

“What?” The pretty non-elf woman frowned at Mrs. Bain, then looked at Marshall. “Do you mean him?”

He almost closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see the disappointment on her face.

But she didn’t look disappointed. Just confused.

“I don’t understand all the customs here,” she was saying, “but why would a banker have snow removal equipment on the back of a big truck?”

Marshall’s breath caught. She had seen that? She had been watching him too?

“He probably repossessed it,” Mrs. Bain said with great certainty. “It would be just his style to repossess the equipment when people need it most.”

“Mom.” Nigel touched his mother’s arm. “He’s been digging people out all day. That’s how we got out of our driveway.”

Mrs. Bain gave Nigel an alarmed look. “You let him on our property? You were supposed to shovel.”

Nigel bowed his head and grabbed some French fries as if they would save him. His face was as red as Marshall’s had been.

“To be fair, Mrs. Bain,” Marshall said, “there was too much snow for anyone to handle with a shovel.”

“Fair?” she snapped. “Don’t you talk to me about fair. Don’t you talk to any of us about fair.”

Marshall sighed. He knew better. He shouldn’t have engaged. He never should have said anything. And now the pretty non-elf woman probably thought he was some kind of monster on top of being a clueless tongue-tied idiot.

“Mom,” Nigel said softly, without looking up. His fries were arranged in a neat row on his tray. “You’re not being nice.”

Mrs. Bain stood, then grabbed her empty tray, and Nigel’s half-full one. “Someday, Nigel, you’ll learn that there are people in this world who don’t deserve nice.”

Marshall would have had to agree with that, but only because he was angry, and he didn’t dare say anything. Why had she butted into his life? Why did she want to ruin it?

Oh, yeah, because people like him had ruined hers—and his was the face of the disaster, at least to her. He had to keep reminding himself of that.

“Where I work,” the pretty non-elf woman said, “we believe all can be redeemed, if they realize they’ve been naughty.”

It took Marshall a moment to understand what she had said. First, he had heard the word “naughty,” and that had conjured the wrong image for him. He didn’t need to hear her say the word “naughty,” not after he had thought it—twice.

But he got past that (he hoped) and realized that the pretty non-elf woman was defending him. It was such an unusual experience that he didn’t know what to say.

“Lie to yourself all you like, honey,” Mrs. Bain said. “A man like that will disillusion you fast enough. Come along, Nigel.”

Nigel shot Marshall another apologetic look. Marshall nodded as imperceptively as he could, and watched as the two of them stalked off. Well, as Mrs. Bain stalked. Nigel trailed like a lost puppy.

“What did you do to them?” the pretty non-elf woman asked.

So much for defense. Guilty until proven innocent. Actually, guilt by association. Years of association, actually.

He had no idea how to explain any of it, especially to a woman who clearly wasn’t from around here. She had been kind. She didn’t need to hear about his strange existence.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“Well,” she said. “I’ve got some time. I’m ahead of schedule, and now that I’m done with this Whopper thing, I’m going to try something else.”

Then she grinned, got up, and headed back to the counter.

He watched her in surprise. He had no idea where she was going to put another entire meal—and he shouldn’t be watching her, not like this, not with the word “naughty” still floating around in his brain.

He should do the honorable thing: He should get up and leave. Right now. That way he wouldn’t embarrass himself any more and he wouldn’t upset the neighbors.

But this was the nicest anyone had been to him in a long time—at least, anyone local.

Only she wasn’t local.

And somehow, the job she did had something to do with being nice.

So maybe “nice” was just a reflex for her. Still, it made him feel better. He hadn’t realized how down he had been until the pretty non-elf woman stood up for him.

He sipped his now-cold coffee. Then he realized that the Burger King was quiet. Most of the patrons were staring at him. Most of them recognized him, either from the neighborhood or those ill-advised neighborhood meetings.

If the pretty non-elf woman stayed here for a few days, she would want a good experience. And people wouldn’t be nice to her if they thought she was a friend of his.

He put the lid on his coffee so that he wouldn’t spill it, and stood up. He needed to leave. Not for him so much, but for her. She didn’t need to get sucked into his world, not even for an hour, not in a fast-food restaurant where half the neighborhood had gone for lunch. She had looked so joyful when she had come in here.

He didn’t want—even inadvertently—to trample on that joy.

5

HE WAS CUTE. No, he was better than cute. He was nice. And really handsome with that dark hair (which needed just a bit of a trim), a little stubble from his long day, and the redness in his cheeks. She hadn’t seen a man with such redness in his cheeks this far from home, and she found that she liked it.

Julka stood at the end of the line, bouncing a little on her feet. She liked him, even if other people didn’t seem to. He seemed kind. She had no idea what he had done to that horrible lady. (Then Julka sighed at herself: she wasn’t supposed to think of anyone as horrible, just unreformed.) And even though he had supposedly treated that lady poorly, he had shoveled her walk, saving her little boy from doing work that might have hurt him.

Because the handsome man was right: anyone with snow experience knew that too much snow had fallen in a short period of time to get rid of it with a simple shovel. It would take mechanical equipment (for the non-magical humans) or some real magical muscle to get rid of the snow in a timely fashion.

And as she had learned throughout her long years at the North Pole, some snow simply refused to be gotten rid of.

She made herself look at the menu. So many choices. If she had known that there were this many choices in all of the various restaurants in the Greater World, she would have stopped eating Delbert’s cooking long ago. She had Greater World money, with more of it appearing as she completed each day’s task.

Julka turned toward the table only to see the handsome man get up. His shoulders were hunched forward and he was holding his tray in his left hand. He looked defeated.

Something in that interaction with the horrible woman (to heck with it: that appellation was staying) had really bothered him.

“Don’t go,” she said, slipping out of her place in line. “I’ll buy you a fresh coffee.”

He gave her that sad smile of his and shook his head. He came toward her, and said softly, “Look, I’m not the most popular person here, and talking to me might ruin your time in this town. So it’s best if we don’t—”

“Nonsense,” she said. “They already saw us talking. Whatever damage there was is done. Besides, I have some things to ask you.”

His sad smile got sadder.

“No,” he said. “It’s best if we just part ways now. But thank you for your kindness. It means a lot to me.”

Then he bowed his head, and walked out of the Burger King.

She almost hurried after him—she hated seeing anyone that upset—but he had been clear. He didn’t think it was good for her to be talking to him.

Which just showed his kindness again.

After he disappeared from view, she rejoined the line. Everyone was staring at her—except for the people who were studiously avoiding her gaze. No one was talking.

“What did he do?” she asked the silver-haired man in the table next to her.

“I’m not sure,” the man said, his tone dismissive.

But she wasn’t going to let it go. “What do you mean, you’re not sure. Everyone is treating him like he’s done something awful.”

“Well, he did,” the man said. “We’re just not sure what.”

“He was an investment banker,” said the little old lady at the table across from the man, her tones hushed as if she had called the gentleman Julka had been talking to a sex crimes pervert.

“Isn’t that a common job?” Julka asked.

“Not exactly,” the woman said. “And he is retired.”

“So what is the problem?” Julka asked.

“Well, those bankers,” the woman said, “they caused the meltdown.”

Meltdown? Oh, the woman meant that financial thing that happened a few years back. Julka had to study it in Advanced Greater World Studies, so that she could converse about it. The “meltdown” had a serious impact on children worldwide, making Santa’s services even more necessary, and overwhelmed him with extra work.

“You think he had something to do with that?” Julka asked, referring to her handsome gentleman. How could he have? He seemed so nice.

“They all did, those bankers,” the woman said in hushed tones.

“And some of ‘em really screwed people,” the silver-haired man said. “They took money from everyone, leaving us with nothing.”

Julka looked out the door, as if she could still see the gentleman. “So why was he digging people out?”

“He seems to think we’ll accept him as a neighbor,” another woman said snidely from the back. “But we never will. Him and his ilk, they ruined us.”

A bunch of others nodded.

“Can’t you forgive him?” Julka asked.

Everyone stared at her as if she had grown a third head.

She shrugged. “I mean, he seems really sorry.”

“There are some things in life,” said the silver-haired man, “that sorry doesn’t solve.”

6

MARSHALL WAS COLD, wet, tired and discouraged. He had promised himself that he wouldn’t quit until he’d finished the last of the neighborhood, but as he drove down the one plowed street, he saw orange wooden saw horses on the road, with a hand-made sign that warned of more downed power lines.

Earlier in the day, he would have figured out a way around so that he could finish his self-assigned mission, but this time, he simply didn’t want to go on. He wanted to get home, take a warm shower, and forget that the day ever happened.

Part of the problem with his neighbors was his house. It was too big for the neighborhood. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t built it: he had bought it, back when he was feeling flush—a large Tudor/Colonial blend that actually worked. It sat on a rise overlooking the entire neighborhood, and underneath the house proper was a gigantic garage that originally housed the first owner’s antique car collection.

As Marshall rounded the corner, he hit the garage door opener, then wished he hadn’t. The driveway was snowed in again. He had cleared it at five a.m., but there had been quite a bit of snow since then, and even more had toppled off the hillside. The garage door was open, but there was no driving inside until he cleared a path.

He pulled into the turn-around in front of the driveway, shut off the engine and rested his head on the steering wheel. He was inclined to chain the equipment to the truck with padlocks and go inside.

But he knew better. Given the way the neighborhood felt about him, someone would damage the equipment, and he would just blame himself for leaving it outside.

He sighed. Today proved one thing. It didn’t matter how much he did, how hard he tried or how many times he explained that he had retired before the collapse. He would always be a pariah here.

Much as he loved his house—and he really did—he would have to move. He couldn’t stay. He needed to find some other nifty house in another nifty neighborhood—and then he had to avoid the neighborhood meetings, or if he went, he would simply say that he was a retired numbers runner. Because, in essence, that was all he had done.

He had run numbers for a bunch of gamblers who had ignored him anyway. They were getting off scott-free, and he was staying here, inadvertently paying for their mistakes.

And missing opportunities with pretty women who wore inappropriate elf costumes at the end of October, women (woman) who had the most enchanting accent and the loveliest blue eyes he had ever seen.

Too bad he had met her under such strange circumstances.

Too bad he would never see her again.

He certainly would have loved to find out exactly who she was.

7

SHE SHOULDN’T HAVE let him go. Julka slipped out of the line, and headed for the door. The poor man. Everyone in this strange town blamed him for something they didn’t even understand.

No wonder Santa had a policy of staying out of Greater World affairs.

Julka hurried out of the Burger King. More cars were coming in, all of them with families inside, and everyone looking miserable.

She understood how snow could make people miserable—she got tired of it herself, long about May—but she never understood how anyone minded the first snowfall of the year, particularly one as dramatic as this one had been. Yes, it was cold; yes, the wind was harsh; but oh, it was always so beautiful.

That’s what these people—all of them—seemed to be missing: The very beauty of living.

She cut across the parking lot, then went to the side of the health club. She only gave a cursory glance around her to make certain no one was watching—these people were so sour that they probably wouldn’t accept real magic if they saw it.

Then she crouched, and sprang upward, using all those magical muscles she had gotten when she got this assignment. She floated up to the roof. The sleigh shimmered ever so slightly, its outline only visible up close, and then only as a cutout against the sky.

She stepped inside, and winced at the stench of peppermint. Delbert was standing at the counter in the back, making a chocolate peppermint banana smoothie. She didn’t even have to check her watch. The appearance of the smoothie meant it was now officially afternoon.

“Took you long enough,” he said.

She ignored that. He said it every single time she came back in the sleigh. Sometimes the statement was accurate, and sometimes it wasn’t. This time, it probably was.

She went over the array of cobbled together computer and magical equipment near the guidance system, and took her seat.

“We need to find someone,” she said.

Delbert swallowed the smoothie in one long gulp, then wiped the brownish stain off his face. “Not our job,” he said—or rather, mumbled. His mouth was still full of smoothie.

She hated the equipment. It looked like three 1950s television sets combined with a steam engine, rope, and a calliope. It had been designed by Santa hundreds of years ago, and modified every century or so. It hadn’t gotten this century’s modification because the fairies who designed the system were at war, and Santa didn’t want to get involved.

The fairies were, so far as she knew, one of the few groups that could easily combine technology and magic. Santa had relied on them for his entire career. Until now.

She put her hands on the screen. She didn’t have the magic to do a Santa-time search, where all she had to do was think of the person and end up with the name, address, personal history and current Naughty/Nice ranking. Instead, she had to use the screen as a window into the camera mounted on the sleigh’s runners.

“I want this thing airborne,” she said.

“Good,” Delbert said. “We going back to work?”

“We’re ahead of schedule,” she reminded him.

“We still have 35 houses to go,” he said.

“And five days allotted. We can do 35 houses in a morning.”

“What happened out there?” he asked.

“Just get this thing in the air,” she said.

He didn’t argue. She was nominally in charge, even if he was an S-Elf. He was an S-Elf on double-secret forever probation, and he would probably never be in charge of anything ever again.

So he moved across the small cockpit to his little chair. Santa’s sleigh had gorgeous benches and seats that molded to your frame. The back-up sleighs were utilitarian because they needed room for food storage, sleeping compartments (uncomfortable and dangerous sleeping compartments, which was why the advance team had a hotel budget), clothing, and other supplies.

Delbert’s hands moved over what looked, to Julka, like a smooth countertop, and the sleigh shuddered. There were only two reasons an S-Elf had to be on a sleigh. The first was to test—as realistically as possible—Santa’s entry into the various houses, and the second was to fly the sleighs. Only S-Elves had the encoding (some of the more scientific types said DNA, but others believed it was just a magical quirk) to get the sleighs in the air.

The sleigh wobbled and tumbled, and then righted itself. Delbert had had too much peppermint and was flying impaired. But Julka wasn’t going to report him—at least not yet. Because if she did, then they might send a replacement, and she wouldn’t be able to get away with…what? She wasn’t sure what she was trying to get away with.

She just knew it was something.

She peered in the glass screen, which bubbled outward just a bit, distorting the images of rooftops, roads, and snow, snow, snow. Crews worked everywhere, repairing power lines or putting up signs telling people to stay away from lines.

No wonder people looked so sad. She hadn’t quite realized the extent of the devastation before. The North Pole knew how to deal with snow from September to May; apparently here, in New England, they did not.

Then she saw what she was looking for: a flatbed truck with snow equipment. It was parked on a road in front of a house, and there he was, in the driveway with a snow blower, sending fresh wet snow in an arc onto what had probably been the lawn.

“There,” she said, pointing.

“Can’t,” Delbert said. “No kids. Not this year, and probably not next.”

“I don’t care about the roof,” she said. “I want to talk to the guy with the snow blower.”

“You know that’s not allowed,” Delbert said.

“And you know if you were right, we couldn’t get hotel rooms with the Greater World money that we’re earning. I want to land on his lawn.”

“He doesn’t have a lawn,” Delbert said. “That’s a pile of snow. And if we land anywhere near the removal equipment, snow will land on us and make us visible.”

“So land on the other side,” she said, not hiding her exasperation.

“Why is this so important to you?” he asked.

“It just is,” she said. And she realized that was her answer. She couldn’t leave their parting like it had been. She needed to talk with the handsome man one more time.

Delbert sighed and ran his hand on that countertop. The sleigh veered slightly to the left, making Julka lose her vision of the street and the snow blower. Then the sleigh settled out and hovered its way down, using its mechanical rudders.

The sleigh landed near that nifty staircase. Julka got out of the sleigh on the far side and sank into the snow up to her knees. She cursed (hoped Delbert didn’t hear her since cursing outside the sleigh was a reportable offense), and used her rooftop magic to skim along the top of the snow to a side street. Then she brushed herself off as best she could, and walked down the icy street as if she had come from the Burger King.

She wasn’t quite sure how to play this. “Yoo-hoo!” seemed too casual. “Hi!” probably impossible to hear over that blower. Walking up behind the handsome man and tapping him on the shoulder would probably scare him to death.

So she waited at the edge of the cleared-off area, and waited until he shut down the blower midway through the job, probably to take a short rest.

“Um,” she said, wishing she had planned this better. “Excuse me?”

He still jumped like she had screamed at him. He turned around fast, nearly lost his balance on the ice, and had to use the handles of the snow blower to catch himself.

“Um,” he said. “Hi.”

He sounded confused. Indeed, he was looking at her as if he wasn’t sure if she was real.

She smiled at him and walked (carefully) up the slick driveway. “I just…you’re a banker right?”

He let out a small sigh, and then shook his head. “No, I’m not a banker. I’m not anything really. I’m retired.”

Judging from his tone of voice, she had asked the wrong thing. But she had committed herself to this, and she wasn’t going to back off.

“Retired?” she asked. “I thought only really old people retired.”

He smiled. The smile was small, reluctant, as if he didn’t smile all that often. “It’s a nice way of saying I quit.”

So she had said something wrong again. Maybe reading and studying customs wasn’t quite the same as understanding them.

“Oh,” she said. “I thought in New England that retiring was mandatory at a certain age.”

He frowned, then barked out a laugh. “In New England?”

“That’s where we are, right?”

“Yes, but—where are you from?”

She couldn’t answer that. She had to give the company’s stock answer, which she felt wasn’t complete enough. “Up north,” she said.

“Canada?” he asked. “I thought Canadians knew about the United States. After all, we’re kinda hard to miss.”

“Yes,” she said, “I mean, no. I mean, you are hard to miss.”

She couldn’t keep going in this direction. She was really screwing up. She understood the difference between the United States and New England, she thought, but apparently not well enough.

“I just came to talk to you after lunch—those people were so strange. They said you did something wrong, but they didn’t know what.”

“They just need someone to blame,” he said. Then he rubbed a gloved hand over his face. “That came out wrong. It came out like I’m accusing them. I’m not. It’s just—”

“You retired,” she said, still not entirely understanding what that meant.

“Yes,” he said.

“And you’ve been spending the last few—months? Years? Being nice to them.”

“No,” he said sadly. “I’ve just been trying to fit in, and that won’t work.”

Then he shrugged, and said, “But you didn’t come here to talk about that, did you?”

“I…” her voice trailed off. She didn’t have a plausible lie. She had never been good at lying, even when she was supposed to for Santa or the kids.

So she pulled off her mitten and stuck out her hand. “I’m Julka.”

“Marshall.” He took her hand, but didn’t shake it.

“Hi,” she said, and blushed.

“Hi,” he said, and shifted just a little. He hadn’t let go of her hand yet.

She liked the way his hand felt, bigger and warmer than hers, enveloping hers altogether. Her eyes met his, and something shivered through her. Something better than nice.

He seemed to feel it too, because his eyes brightened. “I’d ask you to dinner,” he said, “but after that lunch—”

“I know,” she said. “I made a pig of myself.”

“No, really,” he said. “It’s not that. How about coffee? It’s really cold and we could have some coffee. Although I think most places aren’t open. Half the town has lost power.”

“Do you have power?” she asked. Besides power over her. Because he still held her hand and she didn’t mind. She always minded when a man held her hand too long. And some of the elves were just plain gropey, which she didn’t like at all.

“Um.” Marshall glanced over his shoulder at the house. It looked way high up from here, with its odd mixture of Tudor and Colonial—and its seemingly perfect roof. “I do have power. I can make us coffee.”

Her eyebrows went up. “This is your house?”

He nodded. “I thought you knew that.”

She shook her head. No kids, Delbert had said. Not this year, and probably not next.

“So you’re not married?” she blurted.

“No,” Marshall said. That grip on her hand remained loose. The question didn’t seem to bother him. “No girlfriends either. Not for the last year or so.”

She wanted to say How lonely, but then she hadn’t had a special fella for years now and she wasn’t lonely. (Was she?) She had grown up with most of the guys at the North Pole, and they held no mystery for her.

She wanted mystery. She wanted difference. That was why she wanted to travel.

“I should say I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, “but I’m not.”

Then she smiled. She usually wasn’t that forward. In fact, she couldn’t ever remember being that forward, especially with a guy she knew nothing about.

“I can make you coffee inside,” he said, “Or bring it out if you think that’s too bold.”

“It’s not too bold,” she said.

“It’ll take maybe ten minutes to finish the driveway. If you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” she said.

He smiled at her, then slowly let go of her hand. She felt the loss, not just of his warmth, but of him. She stepped back out of the way. She wished she had the skills some of the elves did. Snow removal with the snap of a finger. But her own magic was odd: seeing solutions when other people didn’t even know there were problems. And the added magic she had gotten for the rooftops job hadn’t helped at all.

He turned his back on her and started up the snow blower. As he went forward, someone grabbed her arm. She eeped. She didn’t see anything. But she smelled peppermint and stale elf sweat.

Delbert.

“Hey,” he said. “What is all this? You’re not supposed to fraternize.”

She could barely hear him over the snow blower, and she couldn’t see him at all. He had on his invisibility shield, the same kind of shield that Santa used when a kid stumbled on him in the middle of the night. Only S-Elves could use an invisibility shield, but she’d sure like to try, if nothing else than to get rid of Delbert.

“Leave me alone,” she said in the direction of the hand gripping her arm. She could see a Delbert-sized opening snow drift created by the blower. He had apparently barreled through. He had probably even left tracks all the way back to the invisible sleigh. Delbert really was not the brightest elf in the workshop.

“No,” he said, tugging on her arm. “We’re going to get in trouble.”

And he couldn’t afford any more trouble.

“If something goes wrong, I’ll tell the truth,” she said. “This is all my idea.”

Behind her, the blower sounded louder. It was moving in a different direction. For some reason, that made her nervous. She started to turn—

When an arc of cold snow coated her. Her and Delbert.

8

MARSHALL WAS MOVING too fast. He hadn’t been thinking. (Well, he had been thinking. Of Julka, not of anything else. Julka and coffee and the fact that she had found him, all on her own, and that she seemed nervous and she let him hold her hand and jeez, he felt like he was thirteen, only he hadn’t felt this way when he was thirteen because he hadn’t been able to get up enough nerve to talk to a girl, let alone touch her, or do anything until he was much, much older. College, really, and then only because he had met girls who were also interested in math and didn’t mind awkwardness—and there he was, not thinking again.)

Anyway, he hadn’t been thinking about blowing snow or the powerful machine vibrating under his hands. He had been hurrying so he could get to that coffee, and hurrying never really did anyone any good. He kept going in this kinda fugue state until he heard the blower go crunch, and then make a growly noise that wasn’t normal.

That caught his attention. He had probably hit some kind of decorative rock—which he really had to remove come spring. He backed the blower up, turned it sideways to get it out of the awkward position it was in, and then turned again—and walloped poor Julka with a mound of snow.

His face flushed so hot he could have powered the entire block. He shut off the blower so he could apologize (even though she did look cute, standing there in her red not-elf costume, with snow frosting her hair, eyelashes, and cheekbones) and that was when he realized that there was something else beside her.

Somehow the snow had formed a weird kinda snow man next to her. Only it looked vaguely like an unfinished Santa. Marshall had never seen the snow do anything like that, and he figured it was probably like the ways that clouds formed animal shapes—at least, he thought that until the Santa shape moved and cursed in definitively not Santa-like language.

“Hey!” the Santa shape said in a burly male voice. “We’re standing here.”

Its (his?) violent movement made half of the snow fall (off? Was there something to fall off of?), leaving a partial Santa shape that reminded Marshall of nothing more than a half-eaten unfrosted Santa sugar cookie.

“Shh, Delbert,” Julka said, not moving her lips. But she wasn’t as quiet as she clearly thought she was, because Marshall heard her.

“There really is someone there?” he asked.

“No!” she and the male voice said in unison. Then Julka turned her head and glared at the half-Santa shape.

Marshall looked at him (it?) too, and realized that just past it was a roundish opening in the snow drift, and footprints in the snow that came from the yard somewhere.

This time, Marshall couldn’t blame it on tiredness or on not having food or on his imagination. This time, he knew he was seeing something odd, and he knew it for two reasons:

One, other people in the Burger King had seen Julka. (And besides, he’d been struggling with ketchup-flavored burps ever since he left, so he had clearly been to Burger King.)

And two, if they had seen Julka, and she had come here (and she had, he knew it, because he could still conjure the sensation of her hand in his), then she was talking to the half-Santa shape, and that meant she saw it too.

In fact, that meant that she knew what it was.

“Someone want to tell me what’s going on here?” Marshall asked.

“No,” the male voice said.

“Delbert!” Julka clearly reprimanded the voice, but Marshall couldn’t tell what for. For talking? For standing there? For being rude?

“Just…just…just fix it,” she was saying as if that thought broke her heart.

“I can’t,” the voice (Delbert?) said. “I had most of my S-Elf privileges removed.”

Julka rolled her eyes. “Okay, then,” she said, grabbing the air in front of her and pulling.

As she did, the air waved, like a tablecloth in the breeze. Marshall wasn’t sure what caused that effect. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. But his mind didn’t linger on it long, because as she tugged, a round man appeared.

He had a white beard and white hair, and he was wearing sweats that clearly needed washing, and a too-small T-shirt that said, Lobstermen do it with nets. He looked like Santa but not really.

“You’re not supposed to see me,” this Delbert guy said to Marshall.

“Well, I think the reindeer missed that sleigh,” Julka said, rolling her eyes.

She clearly wasn’t making the comment to Marshall, who was still having a bit of trouble comprehending all of this.

“It’s not my fault, really,” Delbert said. “I’m supposed to have the power to make you not remember seeing me, but they took my privileges away from me, and now I can’t do that. I mean, how can you blame me?”

“I can blame you,” Julka said softly.

Marshall wanted to ask who “they” were, and what the “privileges” were, but he wasn’t sure he would like the answer. The last time he heard the words “they” and “privileges” in an incoherent context, “they” referred to the mental health hospital staff and “privileges” meant walking the hospital grounds.

Which he didn’t want to think about. Because if Delbert was off the hospital grounds, did that mean Julka was too? And how come Delbert had looked invisible? No one could become invisible. Marshall firmly believed that. If he didn’t, he would need to be led along a sidewalk on the grounds, heading toward the hospital proper.

“So,” Delbert was saying to Marshall, “can you just like pretend that you didn’t see me? Because if an unauthorized someone ever sees me again, then I’m going to be sent home and never be allowed out again.”

There it was. Hospital grounds, couched in the vague terms. Marshall closed his eyes and sighed. No wonder people emphasized the power of “nice” where Julka lived. “Nice” meant that folks with mental health issues had to learn how to get along.

It explained why she had looked so happy when she had come into Burger King. Freedom did that for folks.

It also explained why she was here. She had nowhere else to go, except back.

And somehow, he was going to have to be the one to get her there. How on Earth was he supposed to find out where she had come from without tipping his hand? The only clue she had given him was that she was from up north, but he wasn’t even sure he could trust that. Did folks with mental health issues have a good sense of direction?

He had no idea.

He held up his hands as if he was being robbed. Maybe he was. Robbed of his delusions.

“I’ll make sure no one knows I saw you,” Marshall said to Delbert. “I promise.”

“You don’t have to promise him anything,” Julka said. “He screwed up. He shouldn’t have gotten out of the sleigh.”

Then she clapped both hands over her mouth as Delbert slapped her arm.

“I didn’t say that,” he said. “I didn’t. If they blame me for that, I’m going to give you up. I mean it, along with all that weird behavior. And fraternizing. You shouldn’t fraternize. I told you nothing good would come of it.”

Fraternize. Apparently he meant with Marshall. Apparently, these two weren’t even allowed to talk to people.

Marshall let out a small sigh. A perfect capper to a perfectly bad week. He leaned back, shut off the snow blower, and tucked the key in his pocket. Then he almost put his hands up again. That robbing metaphor stuck with him, probably because he felt like he’d been robbed.

“Look, you guys are clearly far from home, and in a strange place and I’m sure that’s not comfortable….”

Lord, he was babbling. Julka was staring at Marshall with such disappointment that he felt worse than he had a moment ago. He stopped talking altogether.

He had encountered yet another situation that he didn’t know how to handle. He had no idea how many more of them he could take.

9

JULKA’S BREATH CAUGHT. Marshall thought she was crazy. She had been warned about this reaction in all of her Greater World classes. If she talked too much about the North Pole or exhibited too much magical behavior, the people of the Greater World would dismiss her as a crazy person.

But she didn’t want Marshall to think her crazy. She had liked the way he looked at her before, the interest in his eyes, the way that he smiled at her, the touch of his hand on hers. She had liked that a lot. More than a lot, actually. She had been looking forward to coffee and conversation, and stretching those 35 houses into five days worth of work, and getting to know Marshall and maybe putting in a request to meet the folks who ran the New England advance team—the entire team, not just the Entry Access Quality Control section. Maybe she could be assigned here permanently. She liked the snow, after all.

She hadn’t realized all of those dreams had been in her mind just since lunch until Marshall looked at her like she wasn’t right in the head. If she could righteously punch Delbert right now, she would. But he had just been trying to save her from herself.

And failing.

But he was correct: it was her fault. She had wanted a bunch of things that were forbidden to her. And she was going to get into trouble for it.

Then she frowned.

She was going to get into trouble for it. Anyway. That’s the word she was missing. She was going to get in trouble anyway, so why not go for broke?

It was better than finding an S-Elf who would make Marshall forget he even met her. She had momentarily been willing to follow that rule, and the pain in her chest—in her heart—had been severe.

She liked this man. She more than liked this man. This man felt—she didn’t even have the word. More appropriate? Better? Right? He felt right for her.

So she was going to go for broke. And if they decided to punish her at the North Pole, so be it. Nothing could feel worse than that moment when she had asked Delbert to make Marshall forget him. Her. Them.

Make Marshall forget them.

She shoved the invisibility shield at Delbert, and hit him with it in the stomach. She liked to think that was an accident, but it probably wasn’t.

He caught it and his hands immediately disappeared. Hers didn’t when she held the dang thing, but Delbert’s did. Of course, someone who didn’t even believe in magic probably wouldn’t notice the difference.

She extended her hand to Marshall. “Come with me.”

He looked at her cautiously, that what’s-she-going-to-do-now look in his eye, the one that people got when she misbehaved. He hadn’t used that on her before.

She had to change the look by no longer earning it.

“Please,” she said.

He glanced at Delbert, blinked, and frowned. Marshall had clearly seen the missing hands. In fact, Delbert was holding the shield in front of his legs, so from the waist down, a circle of him had disappeared, leaving only the outside of his thighs, his ankles and his shoes visible.

No one could miss that. She wasn’t sure how anyone could justify it to themselves, but no one could miss it.

She extended her hand just a little farther. Marshall eyed it like it might bite him, when before he had clearly enjoyed touching her.

She held her breath.

He stepped forward and took her hand firmly in his own. “All right,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”

10

HE DIDN’T KNOW what he expected—maybe that she would lead him to his truck or to the vehicle she had stolen (because if she had escaped from an institution, she couldn’t have one of her own, right?). The one thing he did know was this: He hadn’t expected her to lead him through the hole in the snow.

She dragged him around Delbert, and she walked into the hole. Marshall followed.

The first thing that he noticed was that the hole was a Delbert-sized hole, and that the footprints—heading toward his driveway—were Delbert-sized footprints. But they were the only pair of prints. Marshall saw no sign of Julka’s dainty prints, the ones she was now leaving on the way to—what? He couldn’t tell. But he did see some flat deep marks in the snow, marks that looked like they were made by giant skis.

He felt a shiver run down his back that had nothing to do with the cold. Was someone playing a prank on him? Was this a trick to get the terrible investment banker out of the neighborhood? And if so, why do it now? Why not wait until Christmas?

He was feeling paranoid. Heck, no. He was paranoid. But he had to admit, if only to himself, that this afternoon—ever since he had seen Julka in Burger King (if not before) was extremely strange.

Still, it would be impossible to do such a thing in this storm, on the eve of Halloween.

He didn’t say anything. He let her pull him to the marks in the snow. Of course, he did. And he felt really sad. Because he had liked her more than he had liked any woman he ever met, more than he had liked anyone he had ever met. He had found her intriguing and beautiful in her non-elfish way, and just odd enough to make her interesting to him.

And he had sacrificed that for her, so she could have a good trip here, thinking the memory would be enough for him. Then she had shown up here at his house, and he actually had hope for something more, something that would be—he didn’t know, more than coffee, surely, more than a simple afternoon talking.

He only knew that he could have gazed in her eyes forever.

He reached her side only a second later. He wondered where the joke would go now.

Then she reached up and mimed opening a door.

11

THE SMELL OF peppermint and spoiled veal wafted out of the sleigh, so strong that it made Julka choke. She hadn’t realized just how filthy the interior of the sleigh had gotten.

But, she was going to get in trouble anyway, so she was in all the way. She was taking this risk.

Even if no one else wanted her to.

Marshall no longer looked at her like she was crazy. Now he looked at her with that sadness he’d had at the Burger King. The sadness he’d had when they talked about his life. And that made her feel even worse.

“Come with me,” she said one more time, and climbed the flight of invisible steps into the sleigh.

12

HE STILL HELD her hand. His hand rose up as she climbed a set of steps he couldn’t see.

He wasn’t sure why he couldn’t see them; he just knew that he couldn’t. Usually he could see clear plastic or whatever it was that made the steps impossible to see against that backdrop of new fallen snow. But his eyes were really off this afternoon.

He couldn’t see a thing.

Half of Julka seemed to disappear into the air. But he was holding her hand, so he knew this wasn’t some optical illusion.

He felt around with the toe of his boot until he found the invisible stair, then he put the bottom of his boot on it and slid his foot forward. The toe hit the next stair, but it still looked to him like he was standing on nothing.

The illusion made him oddly uncomfortable.

The smell of peppermint mixed with rotting garbage made his stomach turn. When he reached the top of the third step, he could see Julka, standing inside a—what? He didn’t have the word for it. The interior of a small RV? If it was an RV, it was a 1950s Christmas-themed RV crossed with a 1950s version of a spacecraft or an airplane cockpit.

He felt dizzy, and he realized he was holding his breath.

It was that stench.

Then he leaned back out of the door, and peered at the exterior.

There was no exterior. Only a blank spot where there should’ve been a view of the hedgerow between his property and the neighbor’s, and the curve in the road, and from this vantage, the tip of another neighbor’s house.

“Come on,” she said for the third time.

Third time’s the charm, his mom always used to say. He wondered what she would think now. His mom hadn’t had a lot of imagination. She didn’t even understand imaginary numbers, which made his mathematics brain hurt. A mathematician needed imagination, and his mom (face it, his parents) had none.

Although they had been proud of him. Investment banker, venture capitalist. They hadn’t lived to see the collapse, didn’t know about his loss of reputation, had no idea how lonely he would become.

They had always imagined him with a family—his father had said as much before the cancer took him—and that was their only disappointment. They had passed on before seeing grandchildren.

Or seeing their son lapse into complete insanity.

He stepped inside.

And immediately hit his head on the top of the door. The pain sent a shiver through him. He grabbed his forehead with his free hand. The door’s opening had to be really low for him to hit his head because he was not quite six feet tall. And everything in America was built to accommodate a six-foot tall man.

But Julka had an accent, and she had made it clear she wasn’t from here.

She was from up north. And she had looked a bit confused when he mentioned Canada, so maybe it wasn’t that up north, but a different up north.

And she was wearing a red Santa/elf costume.

His stomach twisted—and not from the smell. Oddly enough, he was getting used to that. His stomach twisted because he was getting suspicious.

He didn’t like what he was thinking.

He hadn’t thought about impossible things since he got his doctorate, when he realized that impossible imaginings and mathematical theories weren’t practical enough to help him survive in the real world. He’d moved to statistical analysis and mathematical systems and economics, and had made a fortune, but had screwed up his life.

So, for a moment anyway, he was going to settle on one impossible thing: A pretty non-elf woman in a Christmas costume on the day before Halloween, standing inside an invisible RV decorated like Santa’s 1950 Christmas nightmare.

Marshall stood up slowly so that he didn’t hit his head on the rounded ceiling. It looked like the ceiling in a camper, not the ceiling in an RV. Modern RVs, they looked like small houses. There was nothing house-like about this place. It was crammed with stuff, including some filthy t-shirts that had crude sayings on them, often with drawings. They, like everything else he’d seen so far, were Delbert-sized.

In one corner, there was a shelf covered with dainty things. That had to belong to Julka.

Marshall moved in a slow circle, taking it all in. Could this be an hallucination? Those usually didn’t come with touch and stink. An illusion? Again, those were usually aimed at the eye, not the other senses. And he was wrong about the stink. It didn’t just use up one sense. It imposed on two. He could taste that rot. Peppermint would never be a happy fragrance for him again.

Julka just watched him, looking a little tense.

“Okay,” he said after a moment. “My first response is that you gotta explain this.”

She opened her mouth, but he held up his hand so that she couldn’t speak.

“My second response is that you don’t dare explain this.” His heart was pounding. “Because if you explain it, then I’m going to have to think about it, and if I think about it, then I’m going to have accept some things that I’m not willing to accept—or, at least, something that I haven’t accepted for oh, twenty-some years.”

Her mouth closed, and she tilted her head, looking both bemused and worried.

“Not,” he said, “that I’m close-minded or anything. It’s just that I’m—oh, God—not willing to change cherished beliefs, which makes me close-minded, I guess, or maybe just adult, because if I take this at face value, then that means Santa is real, and if Santa is real, then all of those science courses I took, all of those courses that I believed in, they would be wrong.”

Julka raised a finger, as if she were going to say something. And he really should let her talk, but he couldn’t stop babbling, because if he stopped, then she would tell him what he was seeing, and that would be a bad thing.

A very bad thing.

“And if the science courses are wrong, well, that’s less serious than the math courses being wrong, because I believe in math, and it is a mathematical impossibility for one man to circle the globe in 24 hours and drop off the right toys at the right house without anyone seeing him. Just on the time factor alone. There aren’t enough minutes in the day. There just aren’t. And that’s for the flying and the landing. That’s not really counting the time it would take to squeeze down a chimney.”

Then his breath caught. He first saw her on rooftops. Looking at chimneys. He’d seen her kick a chimney.

But he couldn’t think about that right now. So he kept talking. Because if he let her talk, then she might say something sensible. (How could there be anything sensible about this?) And he would have to listen, and if he listened, then—

“Maybe I can deal with the loss of science,” he said, “but the loss of math—well, that’s like the final straw. Because I devoted my life to math. Until this moment, I understood math. I have always understood math. That’s why I retired when I couldn’t convince the guys in my office that the way they were floating on one of those proverbial mathematical bubbles and those things didn’t last, but if this is all true, well then, this bubble has lasted, and everything, everything, I know is wrong, and I really really really can’t face that. Not right now.”

Julka’s shoulders drooped. He had disappointed her. Worse, he had hurt her somehow. He wasn’t sure how, but he had.

“It’s not about math,” she started.

“Of course it’s about math.” He sounded even more panicked than he felt. He sounded terrified and wobbly and slightly off-the-beam. Maybe more than slightly off-the-beam. “Don’t you understand? That’s how I knew Santa wasn’t real. I did the damn math.”

“I understand math,” Julka said, moving her hands just a little in a “calm down” gesture. Now she was treating him as if he was the one who was crazy, and maybe he was. This entire idea had left him so unsettled that off-the-beam was really the wrong way to describe it. Off his nut might’ve been better.

“Really,” she said, taking a step toward him. “I love math. It was one of my best subjects in school, and I use it all the time, because I love organizing.”

He almost said with a mathematician’s sneer, That’s not math. That’s arithmetic. But he needed to shut up now. He needed to stop talking and let her say something.

“Math is a phenomenal thing,” Julka was saying. “You can represent it with sticks on the simplest level—you know, one-plus-one-equals-two kinda thing. Then math starts getting really complex, and you have to imagine it and sometimes you have to trust it, and there are pockets of it and corners of it that no one understands at all.”

His breath caught. She did know math. Not arithmetic. Math.

“I have a hunch, if you come back home with me, you’ll find some people who can explain the math and the science to you. It’s elegant.” She glanced at what looked like several old-fashioned TV sets, but through one of them, he could see the neighborhood. He could see his driveway.

Delbert was missing. Was that important?

“You’re telling me that it’s not magic. It’s science.” Marshall couldn’t quite keep the sarcasm from his voice.

“I seem to recall reading a book when I was a kid that said that all science looks like magic to those who don’t understand it,” Julka said.

She was quoting Arthur C. Clarke. A science-fiction writer. One of Marshall’s favorite writers when he was a kid. How long had it been since he had read something for fun?

How long had it been since he had fun?

Then he wondered if he was supposed to be wondering that. Was there something in this sleigh/RV/invisible thing that made him think thoughts he didn’t want? That magicked him?

He sank into a nearby chair. It was large and it smelled of peppermint. He popped out of it quickly.

“So you’re saying it’s all science,” Marshall repeated.

“I’m saying I don’t know.” Julka came closer to him. “But what if it is magic and not science? What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s not possible—”

“Most things aren’t possible,” she said. “Bumblebees aren’t possible, yet they exist. Soul mates aren’t possible, yet people always say they found theirs.”

She bit her bottom lip as if she had said something she hadn’t planned on saying.

Soul mates. His parents said they were each other’s soul mates and believed it too. He had done the math on that as well, and figured with billions of people on Earth that the odds of finding the one person who suited you were—well, billions to one. So he figured (but he never said to his parents) that everyone had a bunch of soul mates, and it was all chemical, and none of that explained the look in Julka’s eyes.

The anticipation, with a bit of fear. The fact that her pupils were slightly dilated which, he had learned in some long-ago biology class, was a sign of attraction.

And it didn’t explain how it bothered him to hurt her or to upset her or how he just wanted to take her hands in his and pull her forward and kiss her silly.

He’d never done anything that bold in his entire life.

“Why did you bring me here?” he asked softly.

She shrugged and looked away. “I was going to get in trouble anyway.”

“For what?”

She bowed her head. “Fraternizing.”

“With me?”

“With anyone who wasn’t, you know, someone I had to talk to, like one of the employees at Burger King.”

Marshall frowned. “You’d get in trouble for talking to me. Why?”

“We have illusions to keep up,” she said, head still down, voice almost a whisper. “The entire world thinks Santa does this alone.”

No, Marshall wanted to say, we’re taught that he has elves. And then Marshall realized that they were taught about the elves in the workshop, not elves outside of the workshop. Not elves on the rooftops of Connecticut.

“You were scouting out chimneys,” he said, less as a question and more as a realization.

“No, not exactly,” she said. “I’m tasked with looking for the best entry locations on the proper houses.”

Corporate speak. She was actually using corporate speak.

“How big is this organization?” Marshall asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Are you asking money or personnel?”

“Both, I guess,” he said, suddenly unable to visualize paying for everything he knew about the fictional Santa.

“I’m not privy to the money side,” she said, “but it’s huge. And we have millions of employees worldwide, not all of them human.”

Not all of them human. He tried not to let his brain turn to mush at that statement. “You mean reindeer, and stuff.”

“Elves,” she said. “They’re not human. Delbert’s not human.”

“He’s an elf?” Marshall asked.

“He’s an S-Elf,” Julka said. “From Santa’s line. Those are the most important elves of all.”

“Wow,” Marshall said, believing it, then wondering if he should believe it, and then wondering if the sleigh (this was a sleigh, right?) made him believe it, and then wondering if he should believe that the sleigh made him believe.

So he gave up wondering at all.

“But you’re human,” he said, and it was more of a hope than a question.

She nodded. “A lot of families got hired real early on to humanize the whole procedure and most of them stayed. My family goes back twenty-five generations at the North Pole.”

He did the arithmetic in his head: Twenty-five generations, at roughly twenty years per generation, was—

“Five hundred years?” he blurted.

“Give or take,” she said.

“So you grew up at the North Pole?” he asked. “I thought it’s desolate there.”

“It’s not the North Pole that you can travel to,” she said. “It’s like this sleigh. We have a different North Pole that you can access—or rather, I can access—through your North Pole.”

His North Pole. He’d never seen the North Pole. Either one, actually.

“And you now work as what—Santa’s advance team?” he asked.

“Kinda,” she said. “I’m probably going to get fired for this.”

“For bringing me here,” he said.

She nodded miserably.

“What happens when you get fired?” he asked.

She shrugged a shoulder. “I’ll probably have to go back to training school, and they’ll find me a job at the Pole. I really, really, really wanted to spend my time in the Greater World.”

“Which is—?”

“Your world,” she said. “I wanted to man one of the advance headquarters, you know, have a permanent place here.”

“And you risked all that to talk to me?” he asked. “Why?”

“I don’t know.” She raised her head. “You just seemed important somehow.”

“Important to…?”

“Me,” she said miserably. “Important to me.”

No one had thought him important for years. Not since his parents died. And then, he wasn’t their main priority. They were each other’s main priority. He was second on their list and had been from the beginning. He had known that almost as soon as he started breathing.

“Why would I be important to you?” he asked. “We just met.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s stupid, isn’t it?”

He took her hands. She was trembling.

“No,” he said. “No. It’s not stupid.”

He wanted to say it was an honor, but that actually sounded like he was dismissing it. And if he said You’re important to me too, it would sound like he was just trying to make her feel better, and he wasn’t.

“I’m standing here,” he said, “and you’re making me rethink everything I’ve ever known, and honestly, I’m not fleeing, which is what I usually do when I’m challenged. I turn away. And I don’t want to.”

Her gaze met his. Her eyes were big and blue and incredibly beautiful. “Why?”

“Because,” he whispered, “I found another place where the math doesn’t work.”

“What—?” she asked.

“Soul mates,” he said. “It’s mathematically ridiculous.”

She nodded, and tried to pull her hands from his.

“But I’ve never felt anything like this before,” he said. “So right, so perfect, as if we were made for each other.”

Her eyes filled with tears, but they didn’t fall. He leaned forward and kissed the corner of one eye, tasting salt, tasting her. Then he showered kisses down the side of her face until she tilted her head toward him.

Their mouths met, and tentatively, hesitantly, they kissed. Then the kiss got deeper, and he finally understood what his parents talked about: that rightness, that sense he had found his other half, that sense of perfection, of—

“Oh, no,” said a male voice. Delbert’s voice. “Now I really will have to report this.”

13

THE SLEIGH ROCKED as Delbert climbed inside. He put both hands on the side of the door as if he was blocking someone’s escape, but Julka didn’t know whose.

It certainly wouldn’t be her. She didn’t want to move. She hadn’t wanted to break the kiss, but Marshall had done so, looking startled—again.

She almost brought her fingers to her mouth in amazement. She had never been kissed like that. She had never felt anything like that before. Never.

And she wanted to feel it again.

“Report?” Marshall asked, sounding a bit unsettled. “To whom?”

“You’d think it’d be to the big guy,” Delbert said, “but he doesn’t handle small personnel matters. Still, this is one of those things. I don’t like reporting anyone for fraternization, Julka, especially since I know how it can go, but I’m on double-secret forever probation, and if I don’t and they find out, I’ll never be able to leave the North Pole again. I’m sorry.”

He sounded sorry. She had never seen him look so upset, actually. He reached over to that flat countertop area and touched a red button she’d never noticed before.

And then he vanished.

“What?” Marshall said. “What was that? Is he still here?”

“No,” Julka said. She felt heavy suddenly. Her legs wouldn’t support her, and she had to grope for one of the chairs before she sat down. She had known it was a risk bringing Marshall here, but somehow she hadn’t thought Delbert would report her. Maybe he wouldn’t have without the kiss. Or maybe he was just giving her a chance to come to her senses.

Which she hadn’t.

She still didn’t regret this, no matter what the consequences.

“Where did he go?” Marshall asked.

“Headquarters,” she said miserably. “They’re going to bring the goon squad here, and they’ll clean up after me.”

“How will they do that?” Marshall asked.

She didn’t want to tell him, although it really didn’t matter if she told him. None of this would matter to him in…oh, five minutes or so.

But she didn’t want to lie to him, not even now, not when she could leap back into his arms and kiss him senseless until the goon squad got here.

“They’ll wipe your memory,” she said. “Delbert should have done it, but they’ve limited his powers.”

She had asked Delbert to do it, but that was before the kiss. It had broken her heart then. It would destroy her now.

Oddly, it felt like she had known this man her entire life—or maybe, it felt like she would know this man her entire life. Better than anyone else.

But that was going away too.

Her hands were shaking.

“They’ll make me forget?” Marshall asked. “They can do that? With magic?”

“I don’t know how they do it,” she said tiredly. “I just know that they do. S-Elves can. Santa can. To protect the myth, you know. It’s all about protecting the myth.”

“From what?” Marshall asked.

She shook her head. “We’re supposed to control the message.”

“And the message is that pretty women can’t kiss men they’re interested in?”

“No,” she said. “We can’t fraternize. You’re not part of the community. You can’t know about us, and I told.”

She worse than told. She showed him everything that she could in the short time allowed. He’d been inside the sleigh. No one got inside the sleigh. No one except people with clearance.

She hadn’t even had clearance until a few months ago.

“I can’t forget this,” he said. “This is life-changing.”

“I know,” she said. And she did. That was why the secrets never got out. They made sensible men kiss women like her. They made sensible men deny their belief in science for a grasp at the hope of Christmas magic. They made—

“No,” Marshall said. “You don’t know. You think I’m talking about Santa. I’m talking about you.”

She froze, just for a moment. What had he said? Her? Really? He found her life-changing like she had found him life-changing?

“I can’t forget you,” he said. “You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me, and I mean ever. Even if I never see you again, I can’t forget you.”

“They won’t let that happen,” she said, resisting the urge to look at her watch. She wanted to know how much time was left before the goon squad arrived, but she didn’t want to know at the same time. “You can’t remember me. Only insiders know this stuff. I should’ve thought it through.”

“Insiders,” he said, kneeling in front of her and taking her shoulders in his hands. His hands were warm, strong. She liked his hands. “You mean people who work at the North Pole—your North Pole.”

“Yes,” she said.

He kissed her. “Julka, you’re brilliant.”

He let go of her and bounded over to that countertop where the red button still glowed. He slapped his hand on the button and nothing happened. Then he kept pounding.

“I don’t know how to make you hear me,” he shouted at the screens, “but give me a job. Surely you have use for a mathematician who understands business and statistics and real money management. I can streamline your business. I can make it more efficient. I know how to save money without changing personnel or making you lose any of your goodwill. I can—”

His voice cut out first. And then he shimmered. And finally, he disappeared.

Julka ran to the countertop. The button was gone. Delbert was gone. Marshall was gone.

Something had happened, and she didn’t entirely understand it.

Correction: she didn’t understand it at all.

14

ONE MINUTE HE was standing in that weird 1950s RV sleigh, the next he was inside a badly decorated 1950s office, complete with single-pane windows frosting up against the cold outside, a humidifier trying to keep moisture in the dry air, a blond desk and matching chair, and a square console television set in the corner, its bulging screen showing the inside of that 1950s RV sleigh, with Julka frantically pressing the countertop he had just been touching.

The room smelled of coffee and cookies. The walls were covered in flocked candy cane wallpaper, and someone had wrapped a green ribbon around the back of the couch. A poinsettia sat on the blond wood end table, and the happy faces of cartoon carolers decorated the window above the door.

The transition made Marshall feel dizzy, but he felt weirdly comfortable too, for the first time in years. It took only a moment for him to understand why: this was a corporate environment—a corporate environment decorated for Christmas (on the day before Halloween), but a corporate environment all the same.

He turned toward the desk. A woman of indeterminate age sat behind it. She had a beehive hairdo dyed so black that it looked like the color would smear on her fingers if she touched it. She wore a lot of make-up, also making it impossible to determine her age, including bright red lipstick that matched her bright red fingernails. A cigarette that he couldn’t smell smoldered in a red and green ashtray that said, “Keep the Happy in Christmas!”

The combination of the words “happy” and “Christmas” collided in his head, and therefore, he wasn’t surprised when the woman spoke to him in a working class English accent.

“So,” she said, “you think you have something to offer Claus & Company.”

Apparently, she wasn’t at all surprised by his appearance. Apparently, she had something to do with it.

He bowed his head just a little. It had been a decade or more since he had had a job interview. There were no chairs on this side of the desk. He felt like he should have a hat in his hands—a supplicant.

“I’ve got more than a decade in finance,” he said. “I know how to make companies more efficient—”

“We’re familiar with you American efficiency types,” she said. “You cut staff to the bone, get rid of markets that are underperforming, and while the business makes a profit, the customers are deeply dissatisfied. We are in the customer satisfaction business, not the profit business.”

He nodded. He wasn’t dressed for this. He didn’t have his resume or any papers with him. All he had were his wits, which, he had to admit, were getting a bit tired on this day.

“I-I know,” he said. “It’s something I’ve decried for my entire career. I got let go from my finance job when I tried to convince the company that they were hurting the very people they were trying to help. I used statistics and math to show that a long-term view would make them more profitable down the road, and it would bring in more customers, and everyone would be happy, but that didn’t—”

“Honestly, Mr. Collier, we at Claus & Company don’t care about your Greater World concerns,” the woman said. “What we care about is what you can bring to us.”

Marshall opened his hands a little. “Normally, ma’am, I research a company before I talk to anyone involved with it. But I’ve been a bit blindsided here. I didn’t know you existed until today—”

“You knew,” she said in a chiding tone. “Everyone knows about us. Then they ‘grow up’ and ‘lose sight of childish things.’ You were one of those, I suppose.”

His cheeks flushed. “The real world—what you call the Greater World…?”

She nodded. That hair moved with her head like it weighed a ton.

“…it can be a harsh and disillusioning place.” He shrugged. “I let it disillusion me.”

“And still, you’re here,” she said, picking up that cigarette and tapping an inch of ash off the end. The cigarette got no shorter. “You can’t be entirely disillusioned.”

“Julka convinced me,” he said, wondering if he should speak her name, wondering if he would get her in trouble. “Only a fool denies what’s in front of him, and she placed it all in front of me.”

“She’s quite attractive, eh?” the woman asked.

They knew. They knew everything, and he was dancing around it all like a fool.

“I like her a lot,” he said. “More than I’ve ever liked anyone. I won’t lie to you, ma’am. The idea of losing the memory of this day, even if I never see her again, is more than I can bear.”

“So you’re just here to get the girl,” the woman said.

He shook his head. “You people give others hope. Even if they don’t want it, they brighten up for just one day. They smile for a moment. I’ve learned these last few years that those smiles are important.”

The woman stared at him and tapped more ash off her cigarette.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m here because of Julka, because she brought something bright and magical and wonderful into my life. I expect I won’t see her again. I expect you to send me on my way. But please, don’t make me forget her. Those moments—even if they’re fleeting—are the most important thing in life.”

The woman still stared at him. Didn’t she have any emotions?

“I have been trying to make up for all I did at my previous work,” he said. “I’ve been doing my best, but I’m flailing around. Being here would give me focus. It would make me remember that there are people behind the numbers. Even when the numbers are impossible.”

The woman put the cigarette in her mouth and took a drag. He still couldn’t smell the dang thing, which was a good thing; he didn’t like the smell of cigarette smoke. But it was a bit freaky.

“If you came to work for us,” she said, “you would get benefits. Your life would be extended by perhaps a century or more. You would be given small magic via spell that would have to be renewed annually. You would get housing and clothing and all of your needs provided for.”

He swallowed. He’d been through these kinds of interviews before. He knew there was a “but” coming.

“But,” she said rather loudly, “you won’t be able to tell your family what you do, and when it becomes obvious that you’re not aging at the same rate they are, you will have to forgo seeing them altogether. You won’t be able to talk to your friends about this either. You will get two weeks annual vacation which you can take in the Greater World, but you cannot do so in the fall or over Christmas. The sacrifice is often greater than the average mortal can make.”

He couldn’t say anything about his friends. His friends had pretty much disowned him when he retired. The new friends that he could have had after that were mostly after his money. So he just said, “My family is gone.”

“Well then.” The woman stood, set down that weird cigarette, and extended her hand. “You’re hired.”

That surprised him too. What a surprising day. But the surprise wasn’t enough to make him lose focus.

He shook the woman’s hand.

“Thank you,” he said, and he meant it. Who knew when he got up that morning that by the middle of the day he would be giving up everything, and realizing that by doing so, he was giving up nothing at all.

“You will go back to Julka and await your instructions,” the woman said. “Congratulations. We at Claus & Company hope that our relationship with you is long and merry.”

“Me, too,” Marshall said. “Me too.”

15

JULKA KEPT HITTING the countertop.

“C’mon,” she said. “I know someone can see me. What did you do with him? Take me to him. He has no idea what home is like. Please.”

She had no idea where he was. Had Marshall hit the red button that was still pulsing there and had it sent him where Delbert was? Or did someone actually hear him make his offer, and take him to the North Pole somehow. She had no idea how that would work for a non-elf. Even elves had to use sleigh magic. Had Marshall somehow triggered something?

“Please,” she said, not quite sure any more what she was begging for. “Please.”

Her hand hurt from hitting the console. She was going to have to come up with something else. They had told her about an emergency way to contact the North Pole if something happened to Delbert, but she hadn’t really paid attention. Nothing ever happened to elves. Particularly elves that stank of peppermint and elf sweat.

Then she realized she was smelling peppermint and elf sweat. She turned around. Delbert was watching her, his head tilted, looking amused.

“At first,” he said, “I thought maybe you were one of those people who fell in crap and came out looking like gold. But the longer my conversation with HR went on, the more I realized you were sent to recruit someone. And damn, if you didn’t manage it. You know, you could’ve told me.”

She didn’t know what he was referring to. Crap? Conversation? Recruit? “Told you what?”

“That you weren’t here to inspect chimneys. I should’ve figured it out. You weren’t the chimney inspecting type. And you got frustrated when there were too many pipes and not enough bricks. The usual chimney worker doesn’t really care.” He tugged on his shirt, pulling it down over his massive belly.

“I was too here to inspect chimneys,” she said. “I didn’t lie to you.”

His eyebrows went up. “You mean that, don’t you?”

“Yes, I mean that,” she said.

He bit his lower lip, then rolled his eyes and sighed. “Ah. They sent you here on a test, and left it up to me to tell you.”

“What?” she asked. She had been frustrated before he showed up. Now she was ready to grab him and shove his hand against the console (repeatedly) so she could find Marshall.

“That guy,” Delbert said, “you know, the one you were kissing? Which I don’t think they planned on, to tell the truth.”

Her cheeks flushed, but she didn’t care. “What about Marshall? Is he all right?”

“He’s in Human Resources right now,” Delbert said, “getting interviewed for his new job. They think you did great. He was a better catch than they expected, but they had to grill him. They didn’t want him to show up just because he wanted to be in your pants.”

“What?” she asked.

Delbert shrugged. “You were the one who wanted a real job, not some workshop management position. A chance to get out into the Greater World, you said. Well, the job choices are limited, but the best ones are the recruiters, because they can go anywhere. Only I’d never met one before, had you?”

It was taking Julka a few minutes to catch up. “You’re saying they tested me. As a recruiter?”

“Yeah,” Delbert said and grinned. “Although I’m really not sure they’re going to want you to kiss each recruit to get him to come to the North Pole.”

“I didn’t kiss him because I was recruiting him,” Julka said. “I like him. I have never kissed anyone like that before.”

“Well,” said a voice from beside her. “That’s good to hear.”

Marshall was standing there. He was wearing just a bit of glitter—the kind that rubbed off flocked candy cane wallpaper. It got on everything.

She threw herself in his arms. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

“I gathered that,” Marshall said.

“They manipulated us into recruiting you. I didn’t mean it,” she said.

He pulled back just a little. “You don’t want me to work at the North Pole?” he asked.

She didn’t, not if it meant she was working here. But that wasn’t what he meant, and she knew it. “I didn’t know about the recruitment or the test.”

“I know,” he said.

“I really like you,” she said.

“I know that too,” he said.

“I….” want to spend the rest of my life with you. Never want to leave your side. All of that was too forward this soon, although it didn’t feel soon.

“It’s okay,” he said, pulling her close again. “I like you too. I more than like you. It looks like I’m changing my entire life for you.”

“No,” she said. “You can’t. You can’t base a relationship on that.”

“Is that what you want?” he asked. “A relationship?”

Her breath caught. “Don’t you?”

He smiled. A real smile without sadness. “Of course I do,” he said, and then he leaned in to kiss her.

Delbert cleared his throat. “You guys realize that you’re going to need me.”

Could Delbert get any more annoying? “For what?” Julka asked.

“The second test. Your first planned event. Seems someone figured out that the kids here weren’t going to trick or treat because of the snow, so they’ll need some kind of open house, complete with candy and costumes. I’m told that you have to organize it pronto, with enough advertising that the kids can find you.”

Julka turned inside Marshall’s arms. “What? We don’t celebrate Halloween.”

“But everyone here does,” Marshall said. “So they told me I needed to show how well I could plan something—and do it fast—and so I thought of this.”

“And then they told me that you’d need S-Elf assistance, so I’m going to assist,” Delbert said, straightening up proudly.

Julka thought it all through. It only took a moment, but she realized what had just happened. She had gotten her Christmas wish. Wishes, actually. The ones she never talked about.

The ability to stay in the Greater World if she wanted. The chance to do a job she would love—organizing. And someone beside her. Someone who would love her and cherish her. Someone she would love and cherish.

“Delbert,” she said. “We need some privacy.”

“Then I suggest you leave here,” Delbert said. “They can turn on the monitors any time.”

Marshall slid his hand along her back and said softly, “My house is right outside.”

“And besides,” Delbert said loudly, as if he didn’t want to hear any of that. “I have to find a great venue, and that’ll take the sleigh. So get out.”

They didn’t have to be told twice. Julka took Marshall’s hand and led him out of the sleigh. They barely made it down the steps when the sleigh took off, displacing the snow, and sending a huge greasy waft of peppermint-colored exhaust into the air.

“Is that normal?” Marshall asked, looking at the red-and-white smoke glistening around them.

“None of this is normal,” Julka said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Marshall said. “Men, women, kisses, soul mates. Seems normal enough to me.”

He wrapped his arms around her again.

She giggled. “I thought you didn’t believe in soul mates.”

“I didn’t believe in Santa either,” he said. “Yet somehow, you managed to change my mind. In an instant. On both things.”

Then he kissed her.

And kept kissing her as much as he could for the rest of their long, magical lives.

1

THE TV FRITZED. Nissa Kealoha clasped her hands behind her, trying to remain calm. She could have predicted the fritz. Greater World technology didn’t work well in the North Pole. Even Greater World technology supposedly modified for North Pole needs.

She stood just inside the door of the television room at Image Headquarters, suppressing a sigh. Pipe, cigar, and cigarette smoke floated around the room like a cloud. The entire place smelled like an ashtray.

Oh, how she missed New York’s nanny state. She liked to breathe. But things were different here in at the North Pole. Older, slower to change. And she had to keep reminding herself of that.

She stepped through the veil of yellow smoke into the room proper. Her eyes stung. She couldn’t see an empty chair. The room was filled with all of the advanced Image Specialists, the ones who refused to leave the North Pole.

Theoretically these people knew how to manage Santa’s image, when in reality, all they knew was how to massage the Great Man’s ego. Not that he had much of one. Santa truly was a Jolly Old Elf, concerned with children and toys and happiness. He didn’t care about his brand, unless something interfered with it.

And the Image Specialists seemed to believe that this latest crisis interfered with the brand.

“Nissa,” said Oskar, the head Image Specialist. Oskar had held the position for at least seventy years, after many successful years in the field. “Come join us.”

He patted the chair beside him, directly across from the fritzing television screen. He, at least, had given up smoking a decade ago. Which didn’t help a lot, considering how many other Image Specialists were puffing on something. She counted five cigarettes, two cigars, and five pipes, and those were the ones she could see.

One of the younger Image Specialists, a woman whose name Nissa could never remember, messed with a DVD player. Another female Image Specialist whispered something about thumb drives and internet hookups.

Nissa knew neither thumb drives nor internet hookups would work. Discounting the smoke, which had to have a major impact on electronics, the technology faced a larger problem.

The technology was made in the Greater World. This particular version of the North Pole didn’t exist in the Greater World. This North Pole was in its own magical sideways universe, one that sort of looked like the Greater World, but wasn’t the Greater World.

And the real techs at the North Pole, the ones who could handle Greater World gadgets, worked in Tech Toys, a protected area that separated technology from the magical energy which filled the Pole.

Nothing protected the technology in Image Headquarters. And, to make matters worse, the conference room’s natural magic was considerable: the oak table had ancient spirits in it, the glass table top was made of sand from magical beaches, and the thickly upholstered chairs were spelled for comfort. The people magic was considerable as well.

Oskar was the most powerful mage in the room. He could create an image with a thought. He’d lived in the Greater World for more than a century, and had finally come back here as a reward. Nissa didn’t want a reward like that. The longer she stayed at the Pole, the antsier she got.

But she did know how Oskar had become the most powerful Image mage. He’d done it through hard work. In the 1860s, he’d been the one to convince illustrator Thomas Nast to draw Santa Claus every year, a stroke of genius superseded only by the Coca-Cola ads of the 1930s (also Oskar’s idea—planted in the mind of greedy cola executives).

Nissa used to admire Oskar—okay, to be fair, she still admired him, but she now knew that his knowledge of the Way Things Worked In The Greater World was horribly, awfully, terribly out of date.

She didn’t say that as she sat down next to him. He smiled at her absently, like an indulgent father. He was old enough to be her great-great-grandfather, although he didn’t look it, with his pale blond hair and unlined face. He kept himself trim, which accented his great height, something that marked him as extremely extraordinary in a world of fat elves.

She wasn’t fat either. She had to stay media-perfect—American media perfect. Ten pounds too thin (just right for the cameras), athletic and toned, expertly trimmed hair, and very white teeth, “blazingly white,” one of the Image execs at the far end of the table had said one afternoon. Not that he should talk; his teeth were brown from centuries of pipe tobacco and a fondness for hot cocoa before bed every night.

Most everyone in the room was white and male, except for the two fiddling with the technology and Nissa herself. Nissa didn’t look like anyone else. She had black hair (most didn’t), cocoa-colored skin (most didn’t), black eyes (most didn’t), and a smile that her mother called pure Hawaiian (thanks to her father, may he rest in peace).

Nissa fit into New York, where no one noticed how different she was. Nissa, who had a beloved apartment on the Upper West Side in New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice. She missed both the city and the apartment more than she wanted to admit.

“How’s your mom?” Oskar asked, ever so polite.

“Better,” Nissa said. Her mother had severe diabetes, a heart condition, and a reluctance to get medical treatment. Nissa wanted to take her mother to the Greater World for care, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it, even though the magical doctors in the Pole had done everything they could.

As they reminded Nissa every time she visited, magic had its limits. It could extend a human life, provided the human was healthy when she got the magical life extension, but magic could not prevent death—something Nissa had learned the hard way when her father had had a massive heart attack ten years ago. He’d been dead before he hit the floor, the doctors said, and then they told her that they wouldn’t revive him.

To do so here, they said, would invoke black magic—even if they used Greater World techniques. All of the magical in the various magical realms were terrified of having their magic sink into evil, but here, at the North Pole, they were downright phobic about it.

Which was why she wanted to take her mother away from here to help her get healthy. At least Greater World doctors weren’t afraid that normal, life-saving techniques might make them evil. In fact, Greater World doctors believed that saving lives was not only part of their jobs, but part of the reason that they were on the side of angels.

(If only they had met some of those angels they sided with; they might reconsider.)

The television fritzed again, then popped. One of the women near the screen cursed.

“Can’t you just tell me what’s going on instead of trying to fix that?” Nissa asked. She didn’t want to be in this room any longer than she had to.

“We wanted you to see it,” Oskar said. “Weirdly, it’s actually getting traction, and the Big Guy himself is concerned.”

The Big Guy was Santa. But Nissa couldn’t trust Oskar’s statement. She didn’t know if the Big Guy was concerned or not. His handlers might have been concerned. Usually, they didn’t bother the Big Guy with anything outside of the toys, children, and humanitarian concerns of the operation. He had more than enough to do every day; he didn’t need branding or image worries too.

Oskar might have been the only one truly concerned, and he might have been speaking with the royal “we.” Or rather, the fantastical “we,” since Santa, for all his importance, had no royal blood.

“Got it,” one of the women said as an image flashed across the gigantic TV screen.

The image showed a standard talk show set. Judging from the golds and yellows, this show was American daytime, probably morning, filled with “news” and happy talk. Nissa hated happy talk, and she shouldn’t. Half of what she did influenced the happy talk hosts. They were Santa’s biggest media supporters in the weeks before Christmas Day.

The camera panned onto a dark-haired man wearing tweed. “…unhealthy lifestyle,” he was saying. He had a rich, deep voice, an actor’s voice. A singer’s voice. A Voice-voice, her trainer had once called it. A gift from the gods, and magic in and of itself.

Then the image winked out. The woman in front of the television cursed and bent over the technology again.

The sound continued, even though the images did not.

“…has lots of nasty habits. The examples he sets aren’t good ones. Let’s not even discuss the sugar, although we should, given his girth. Let’s talk about the homes where he gets a glass of eggnog alongside those cookies. Eggnog, in most places, is laced with rum. And then what does he do? He gets into his vehicle and drives to the next location. After one or two of those, he’s probably tipsy. Anyone would be. But I can’t imagine that he would be merely tipsy. He’s spending twenty-four hours plus eating cookies and drinking rum. His capacity for alcohol…”

“This is what you wanted me to hear?” Nissa asked. “Some rant against Santa?”

“This is not a rant,” Oskar said. “We can ignore rants. This is an amazingly well-put-together argument, perfectly pitched toward America’s concern with obesity and overindulgence. The country’s ripe for this kind of discussion, and we all know that where the United States goes on this holiday stuff, the world follows.”

Well, that wasn’t true. Large sections of the Greater World didn’t celebrate Christmas at all. Large sections of the United States didn’t celebrate Christmas either. Nissa’s neighborhood in New York had as many Jews as Christians, and the neighborhood two blocks away was mostly Muslim. She had no idea how many people in New York City actually celebrated Christmas as a religious holiday, and how many simply ignored it, letting the seasons and the seasonal holidays wash over them like rain.

But once upon a time, Oskar had lived in a rarefied United States, one that closed its eyes to differences—or discriminated against them. Nissa wasn’t sure if he left before or after 1950, but it didn’t matter. He missed the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, and dozens of other movements.

Plus, he still had a Eurocentric Greater Worldview, something she had tried to argue him out of, and failed.

“People have made the argument this guy’s making before,” Nissa said. “In 2009, The British Medical Journal suggested that Santa eat carrots and ride a bicycle, just so that children would understand a healthy lifestyle. I’m the one who killed that story by having everyone cover it. Every single reporter laughed at it, which was exactly what I intended.”

“I know,” Oskar said. “Your solution was brilliant. Which is why I’m assigning you this.”

She sighed, and stifled a cough as she got a mouthful of smoke. She’d have to take a shower after she left here.

“This sounds like the same kind of thing,” she said. “I’ll assign it to a member of my staff when I get back.”

Which she hoped would be Real Soon Now. Since everyone at the North Pole was focused on Christmas, the tension here in the holiday season was outrageous. She hated the North Pole at Christmas.

New York, on the other hand, was beautiful at this time of year.

“What this young man is arguing is not the same kind of thing,” Oskar said. “This time, the argument isn’t coming out of a medical journal. It’s coming from Professor Ryan Palmer, a deadly combination of good looks, charm, and brilliance. He’s entertaining, passionate, witty, and on a damn mission.”

Oskar leaned forward and frowned at the television. The Voice-voice—Ryan Palmer, apparently—was chuckling, and saying, “…yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, but we’ve seen that imagery impacts belief. Smoking has gone down since cigarette advertising was banned on television in 1970, and by eliminating child-friendly icons like Joe Camel, fewer young people…”

Nissa glanced around the room to see if anyone was hearing that argument. The Image Specialists didn’t even smoke less as Palmer talked about smoking declining. They just clung to their cigarettes or puffed on their pipes, as if something like a Greater World Voice-voice couldn’t screw up their bad habits.

“Can’t you get the picture back?” Oskar asked one of the other women.

“Trying,” the woman closest to him said.

Nissa tried to focus on the task at hand, which was, she was beginning to realize, letting Oskar know that Palmer wasn’t a threat. Nissa didn’t want to spend the holiday season arguing with some professor, as if she were his perfect foil. She had a schedule mapped out, one that would remind everyone of Santa, and would help all the charitable organizations Claus & Company had set up to deal with the other problems that the public noticed only at Christmas—poverty, homelessness, starvation (even in big countries like the US), and childhood illnesses. She loved using her position at Claus & Company to goose holiday donations.

She didn’t want to be distracted from that mission.

And if anyone would distract, it would be a voice-voice. Palmer’s was perfect. That quintessential American announcer combination between kind, reassuring, and authoritative. Palmer sounded like an adult version of your very best friend.

Nissa frowned at the entire idea of it.

“This Palmer is on a mission against what exactly?” she asked. “Santa?”

“No, no,” Oskar said as if that were unthinkable, and it probably was. “Professor Palmer is on an anti-obesity mission, and that’s a bandwagon that everyone seems to be jumping on of late. But he has a particularly interesting way of approaching it. He says we shouldn’t be tolerant of role models who overindulge.”

“That’s not original.” Nissa had heard that argument since she left the Pole and moved to New York, almost two decades ago. “And besides, criticizing role models doesn’t work. America hates judgmental types.”

Oskar patted his shirt pocket. She realized he was looking for a cigarette. From across the table, someone slid him a cigarette package. With a camel on the cover.

She didn’t know if someone had magicked it as a screw-you to Professor Palmer, or if no one in the room had noticed that the man had even been talking about cigarettes.

“That’s the point,” Oskar said as he picked up the package. “Somehow this Professor Palmer isn’t coming across judgmental. He’s managing to come across like a reasonable guy with the solution.”

She had no idea how that argument, even made with a voice-voice, could be anything but judgmental. “His solution is to make Santa skinny?”

“No,” Oskar said. “The solution is to change Santa’s habits. Palmer’s arguing that Santa’s behavior is very last century, and we need a new Santa for the modern age.”

She looked at Oskar in surprise. He was staring at the blank television, turning the cigarette pack over and over in his hands.

“Do you think he’s correct?” she asked.

Oskar shrugged. She couldn’t tell if he was being noncommittal or if he did not want to agree with Palmer in front of the Image Specialists.

Still, she wasn’t going to let Oskar off the hook.

“You were the one who made Santa’s image public,” she said. “It’s not even really an ‘image.’ It’s who he is. We can’t change who he is from the outside.”

That had been part of Oskar’s genius. He had convinced the mortals in the Greater World that they had created Santa in their own image. In reality, their images just reflected the S-Elf who occupied the position.

Santa got voted in by S-Elves, just like popes got elected in the Catholic Church—only at the North Pole, the vote came a lot less often. Santas held their position for centuries, and could sometimes decree that a beloved child or heir take their place. It all depended on the S-Elf’s magical capability, purity of his elf heritage, his empathy, and his political skills.

“You’re not saying we’re getting a new Santa, are you?” she asked, feeling both alarmed and intrigued. She’d been hearing rumors for years now that the current Santa was getting tired and wanted to pick a successor soon. She hoped that a female S-Elf would get the position, but had been informed that such a thing would never occur in her lifetime. Every century of it.

“No, I’m not saying Santa’s retiring,” Oskar said as one of the women slapped the television. It vibrated on its stand. Nissa wanted to tell the woman that hitting a television to make the picture clear hadn’t worked in more than fifty years, but she knew she was just wasting her breath.

“Then what are you saying?” Nissa asked.

“There are a lot of competing images out there,” Oskar said. “Lots of things that demand the modern child’s attention. Santa is one of the few pure things left. For about ten years, a child gets to believe that magic exists. So many then get over that, and their lives become dull and sad. But those that hang on to the spark—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” she said. She wanted him to get to the point. Everyone in the North Pole had been raised on this ideology. Those children who hang on to the spark become the Greater World’s optimists, the ones who believe anything is possible if they only give it a try. The others, well, life got increasingly more dreary for them as the years progressed.

She’d never seen any studies that proved or disproved this theory, but that didn’t change the fact that everyone in the Pole used the theory as an argument. And honestly, she loved that theory. It was one reason she worked for Image Headquarters at Claus & Company. To use Santa’s good image to promote everything she cared about.

But her desire to get to the point got misinterpreted.

“Don’t dismiss that idea, missy,” said Ludwig, who sat in the back. He was one of the oldest of the Old Boys, a man with a long white beard, a subservient wife, and an ego the size of the Atlantic Ocean. She had always wondered how he’d managed to keep that ego in check so he could work with Oskar.

The other Old Boys also had egos, just not as big as Ludwig’s or Oskar’s. They all had had illustrious careers, careers she’d studied in Image class, and then confirmed (in her own way) on her days off in New York. She’d spent a lot of time in the New York Public Library, digging through old images and archives, looking for pictures of the Old Boys.

And she’d found a few, mostly in group settings like this one, holding stogies and some kind of liquor and looking very pleased with themselves.

“I’m not dismissing the argument,” she said, trying not to sound defensive, even though she had been trying to move Oskar forward. She wanted out of this room. “I’m just familiar with it. We all are. I understand how important child-magic-beliefs are.”

She probably shouldn’t snap at her so-called betters. Not if she wanted to remain employed.

And while she found a lot to dislike about life in the North Pole, working for Claus & Company was one of the best jobs in any world, Greater or otherwise. She wasn’t sure what would happen to her if she got fired. She wasn’t even sure if she could continue to live in New York. She might have to come back here and work the toy-manufacturing line—the physical line, not the one that used magic. Her magic wasn’t strong enough to work on the magic part of toy assembly. She’d learned that early. As a young mage, she’d put in her time at the physical assembly line. Even now, the idea of putting safe, plastic baby toys in gift-wrapped boxes made her shiver.

“Well, then, missy,” said Ludwig. “Shape up your attitude.”

She started to take a deep breath to calm herself, then changed her mind, and exhaled. She would make it through this meeting without coughing. She would.

Oskar looked at her sideways, with just a bit of sympathy. Then he patted her knee. His hand came to rest on her thigh. She wanted to tell him that such familiarity wouldn’t play in the Greater World, but she knew what he’d say. This wasn’t the Greater World.

He’d say this was better.

And he might be right.

She frowned at the blank television. Professor Palmer droned on. Although really, she couldn’t call his side of the conversation droning. Even without the visuals, he was compelling. He had to have some magic. Or supreme amounts of charisma. It wasn’t just the argument alone that made him impossible to ignore.

“I’m still not clear on any of this,” she said. “What does this Palmer want, exactly?”

“He wants Santa to be a force for good,” Oskar said.

Well, that was offensive. “Santa is a force for good,” she said.

If she didn’t believe that, she wouldn’t be working for Claus & Company. She wouldn’t have given up her life for it.

“We know that,” Oskar said, “but Professor Palmer’s tarnishing the brand. We can’t allow that. We must control the image ourselves.”

She looked at Oskar’s sincere, unlined face, and resisted the urge to remove his hand from her thigh. She didn’t want to offend him, although really, Palmer and the job he represented was annoying her.

“Can’t we just let this blow over?” she asked Oskar.

“Some things blow over, some things don’t,” Oskar said.

She’d heard that before as well. It was Marketing 101. The next thing he’d say would be that if they didn’t get ahead of this train, then it would pass them by, and she would say that if they got in front of a train, it could run them over, and then they’d all argue about the use of metaphor and whether or not it was accurate, and then they’d return to the topic, and the decision would end up being the same.

When Oskar had an idea this strong, no one crossed him.

But she had to try. “I’m afraid if we give this professor credence, then the story will become bigger.”

“…not even sure kids can relate to Santa anymore,” Palmer was saying. “One hundred years ago, a fat, sated man was the epitome of wealth. Now we know that such a man is a heart attack waiting to happen. We associate his level of obesity with a lack of care instead of too much care…”

She closed her eyes. Okay. That was a good argument. Santa the Slovenly was not going to play in Peoria.

Oskar’s hand slid a little too close to her inner thigh. He leaned over and blew cigarette breath on her. “Now do you understand?”

“Yeah,” she said, opening her eyes. The television image had returned, and it now showed rows and rows of clapping people, all looking pleased. “Unfortunately, I do.”

2

RYAN PALMER SPIT the last of the mouthwash into the highball glass and replaced the plastic lid. Then he opened the little cupboard on the limo’s side door and placed the entire mess in the dirty-dish box. That he knew where this model of limo stashed its dirty dishes pointed to the fact that he had spent too much of the last few weeks doing press interviews on someone else’s dime, and not enough time actually living his life.

And now he was in New York. He’d recognize the city just from its sound. Honking horns, construction noise, the rush of traffic—all audible through the limo’s soundproof windows. He loved the city. He’d gone to school here. At any other point, he would look out the window, compare the city now to the days when he had lived here, but not even that interested him. Right now, all he wanted to do was get to his hotel and take a very long nap.

Which wouldn’t happen for at least three hours, maybe more.

The limo had pulled up in the elite section of the underground parking at one of the most famous network buildings in America. They even had had three television shows named after this place’s address. So many famous people went in and out of here that they needed several protected entrances, even though it was New York, and all the locals were supposedly blasé about the famous.

Ryan did not want to be here yet. All the way from the airport, he’d been angling to be let off at his hotel. He figured he had an hour before he had to arrive for whatever show was on his schedule next, an hour in which he could shower, put on different clothes, and maybe, just maybe, be alone for just a few minutes.

Ryan had asked the driver to take him to the hotel and the driver had politely refused. After all, Ryan hadn’t hired the driver, and drivers hired by publicists knew better than to drop an unsupervised client at an unplanned location. That was how drivers got fired and unsupervised clients made it into the tabloids.

Although Ryan didn’t think he was famous enough to be tabloid fodder. Yet, his publicist would say. Or rather, the publicist hired by the university would say. That publicist came highly recommended, from the university’s usual PR firm. The firm’s usual university publicists handled the athletic department—the young kids who had no idea how to play Famous Star Quarterback or Nearly Superstar Basketball Player, not to mention the coaches and assistants who generally put a foot in something (and not always their mouths).

No, that firm wasn’t used to a mild-mannered scientist who specialized in public health. In fact, upon meeting him, the publicist had told him that everything about his resume screamed Stay Away From the Media! Her name was Wendy (“Think magic!” she said when she introduced herself. “You know, like Peter Pan.”), and she was younger than half his students, although infinitely more focused.

If it hadn’t been for the YouTube video one of his graduate assistants had talked him into making, Ryan wouldn’t be “on the cutting edge of celebrity,” as Wendy said, speaking learnedly about something that everyone else was taking just a tad too seriously.

Ryan could not believe the fuss. Santa Claus did not exist, except in the imaginations of small children. Santa Claus in the 21st century was a media creation that the people once known as the Wizards of Madison Avenue had created to sell cola, for heaven’s sake.

Back in the days when cola had cocaine in it.

The limo driver opened the door, startling Ryan. “We’re here, Doctor Palmer.”

Ryan hated being called “doctor,” too. He had a medical degree, but he chose not to use it. He never really trusted himself with diagnosis, and he had discovered that he hated surgery. He preferred “Professor,” but no one in this weird media realm he found himself in wanted to use that.

Actually, he suspected Wendy told them not to. She thought “doctor” was a lot more impressive and added to his credibility.

Think Doctor Phil, she said.

Indeed, Ryan had replied, who was thinking of Dr. Phil, a man with a Ph.D., but no medical license. Ryan hadn’t said anything disparaging, but only because he had learned that arguing with Wendy was like arguing with his C students about homework—there really was no point.

“I’m told they got clothes for you upstairs. Someone will meet you at the door and get you to makeup,” the driver said.

Oh, goodie, Ryan thought, but didn’t add. Because really, who said “goodie,” any more anyway, at least as a full-fledged adult.

“Thank you,” he said, and reached for his wallet. He was going to tip this driver, no matter what anyone said. This guy had at least been friendly.

“No, no,” the driver said, waving his meaty hands. “I get well paid by your company. I’m not allowed to do the tip thing.”

He didn’t even sound regretful, unlike the driver in LA who had complained about that regulation for half the drive through the virtual city that was LAX. There, Ryan had been happy to raise the privacy screen.

He got out of the limo into a semi-decorated parking garage filled with murals of famous faces. That still didn’t get rid of the stench of exhaust and spilled beer, but it did let him know he was in a better class of parking structure.

As if that mattered.

He got onto the elevator and closed his eyes as the door eased shut. Just a moment of alone-time, but that moment might mean everything. When this little whirlwind was over, he was going to get off the media merry-go-round; he didn’t care how many books it sold or how famous he got. He didn’t want to be Dr. Palmer, talking about children’s health on national television and listening to fat people complain that their holiday recipes were a once-per-year indulgence and a family tradition.

A slender arm with red nails and pricy bangles caught the door just before it closed. He felt a second of irritation before the door slid back to reveal the woman of his dreams.

This woman was tall and slender, with wedge-cut black hair and almond-shaped black eyes that snapped with intelligence. Her mouth was thin and a shade of red that matched those nails. But the rest of her makeup was subtle: pre-television makeup, the kind that kept the beautiful beautiful before they became HD-ready.

She wore a form-fitting black dress that suggested but didn’t quite execute an art deco design. The dress’s geometric patterns actually accented the wedges in the woman’s hair. She clutched a white wool coat to her chest, as if she were hot (and she was hot, just not that kind of hot), even though it had to be below freezing in the elevator itself. She wore strappy, high-heel shoes that made her as tall as he was, and some kind of silvery legging that suggested both nylons and leg warmers.

He had noticed all of that as she made her way across the elevator’s tiny space. He was staring, and that was probably wrong. Besides, identifying her as the woman of his dreams just proved that he was exhausted. He didn’t have dreams about women—except those dreams that he assumed every man had (and enjoyed) in those long days between relationships.

She nodded at him, and then did the urban-elevator gaze. It focused on the changing numbers, as the elevator climbed its way up. He was heading to the third floor. He figured a woman clutching a large tote bag, a heavy wool coat, and the latest, coolest tablet would be going up higher in this seventy-story building, maybe to one of the business floors.

Her hair moved ever so slightly revealing a small ear. It looked vaguely pointed, which, for some geeky reason, made her even more attractive to him.

He sighed, and that made her glance directly at him. He gave her a nervous smile—he was always nervous around beautiful women—and then he focused on the elevator’s crawling numbers just like she did.

Finally, after what felt like two hundred years, a ping announced their arrival on the third floor. He shifted as the door opened, then watched in surprise as she stepped out first. He had almost impolitely shoved his way past her, assuming she was getting out on a different floor, and he was glad he hadn’t. For some reason, he didn’t want to seem rude in the eyes of a woman he had never really met and would probably never see again.

Wendy, darling Wendy, Wendy darling, (he sighed a second time) was waiting for him outside the elevator, her own tablet clutched against her massive (and expensively artificial) chest. She resembled a cartoon drawing of a beautiful woman next to the woman who had just gotten off the elevator. Wendy was taller and thinner, but her red hair had an orange tint that looked dyed, despite the efforts of the high-end salon that catered to her every whim.

Wendy was frowning at him and he wondered just how rumpled he looked.

“Who was that?” she asked, glancing at the back of the beautiful woman who was now walking down the hall.

“How should I know?” he answered. That beautiful woman could have been the biggest superstar in the world, and he wouldn’t have had the slightest idea who she was. He followed media trends, but not industry gossip. He never knew who the latest, hottest star was. He’d learned, following trends as they applied to public health, that what was hot now would be forgotten a few weeks from now.

Except for the mega-trends, the mega-creations like—um—Santa Claus.

“She looks familiar,” Wendy said, but not in a positive I-just-saw-someone-famous way, but in a this-could-be-a-disaster way.

Ryan shrugged. He didn’t want to think about the beautiful woman any more. Which wasn’t exactly true. He did want to think about her. When he conjured up ideas of female beauty. Alone. Not before yet another dumb interview.

“Is there a green room?” he asked, changing the subject.

“You’re not going to the green room,” Wendy said. “You need a shower, a change of clothes, and makeup. You have shadows under your eyes that children could sleep in.”

Wendy, darling Wendy, Wendy darling. She was the one who had set up the brutal press schedule in the first place. Didn’t she realize that real humans needed to sleep and eat and maybe sit by themselves at least once every day?

Oh, wait. He had already had that discussion with her, and she had said, You can handle this for six weeks. They had known each other maybe an hour at that point, and he had never figured out what made her so certain he could cope with a killer schedule.

Even now, four weeks in, she wouldn’t listen when he mentioned sleeping and eating and alone time. She seemed to believe he should get up from the six hours of sleep the brutal schedule allowed him, and look camera-ready.

He wasn’t camera-ready on eight-plus hours of sleep, let alone when he was jet-lagged, woozy with exhaustion, and hungry. That slice of pizza he’d managed to snag on the way through the airport had held him for exactly 90 minutes.

He said, “Is there food—?”

“There’s always food in the green room,” she snapped. “Make sure none of it sticks in your teeth.”

The green room was one shower, some stupid dress clothes, and a half hour in the makeup chair away from him. His stomach was already rumbling.

If he had known the price of media fame was exhaustion, boredom, and repeating the same argument in front of a new group of (unbelievably dumb) talking heads, he wouldn’t have signed on in the first place.

And, to be fair to himself, he’d tried not to sign on. The president of the university had convinced him to do this. We’re in a tough time, the president had said. We can’t continue raising tuition. We need alumni donations now more than ever, and alumni tend to donate when someone from their alma mater becomes famous for the right things, especially things we can exploit academically. So help us out, Ry, okay?

That “Ry” had almost made Ryan say no. No one called him “Ry.” He sounded like bread. But he had agreed, because he did care about the university. And he had thought getting his message out would help kids and families.

He hadn’t expected everything to focus on the three pages in his book where he had used Santa Claus as an example of harmful media hype that needed updating for the modern era.

“Doctor Palmer?” Wendy said in that tone that he was sure she would use on a poor, defenseless husband someday. “Shall we?”

Ryan sighed a third time. Once more into the breach, he thought, because he knew saying it out loud would be worthless. Wendy would ask him what it meant, and then he’d have to explain Henry the Fifth. Hell, he might have to explain Shakespeare.

Wendy was a high-end representative of the media/publicity/punditry class. She was smarter than most, which wasn’t saying much.

He’d been on a few shows where he felt like he’d have to explain who Santa Claus was.

He hoped the upcoming appearance wasn’t one of those.

3

THE MAN IN the elevator had been unbelievably gorgeous. Magically gorgeous. So gorgeous, in fact, that Nissa worried he was a celebrity whom she didn’t recognize. She’d met a lot of celebrities who could make themselves look relatively normal with the right choice of clothes, stubble, and a two-day lack of sleep. She used the word relatively, because it was always hard to hide the great facial architecture that a camera loved, blue eyes that suggested a thousand perfect summer days, and lips so kissable that it was hard for a woman—any woman—to resist.

Get a grip, she told herself as she headed down the hall to check in with the producers of the show she privately called Made-up Controversies Are Us. She’d been on the show dozens of times, usually in the holiday season. But she’d become a regular at other times of year, talking about retail sales and unemployment rates—only because she was pretty and articulate and had a tangential connection to those things.

If the producers truly knew who she was, she’d be on the show all the time, while they tried to get the Big Guy as the Big Get. But she used her time to plug Claus & Company, and then to remind people to donate to whatever cause was at the top of the company list that week.

Besides, she liked being the go-to girl when the producers needed something. That meant she could trade favor for favor, and get on the show when she really needed to.

She really needed to this time. She needed to deal with that Palmer idiot before he got any more airtime. She had promised the producers excellent television, so she needed to be focusing on her arguments.

Not on that incredibly handsome man in the elevator.

That was the weird thing: She saw incredibly handsome men all the time. She worked in PR, for heaven’s sake, and she was on television daily during the holiday season. When she came to this place, the home of two networks (one a spin-off) spread out over a dozen floors, she saw Everyone Who Was Anyone. The big names were either doing talk shows or long-running variety shows, always here to promote their latest TV series/album/film.

She had shared a table with George Clooney in the commissary and not lost her head over his gorgeousness. (Honestly, in real life, he was a bit too thin—just like most actors. Not because they hated food, but because of that camera-ready thing.)

She had corralled one of Brad Pitt’s 800 children, who, Pitt assured her when she brought the kid into the green room, was usually better behaved. She went out onto the loading dock one afternoon and stumbled on Ewan McGregor, smoking. She had been a bit stunned at just how short he was.

The thing about actors, producers, writers, celebrities, was that they were real people and yeah, they might be good on TV or gorgeously airbrushed in the pages of Vanity Fair, but they had a human side just like everyone else. They wore too much cologne or ate with their mouths open or fell asleep and snored in the makeup chair.

Even though she’d met almost all of People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive honorees (if you wanted to call them that), none of them had hijacked her brain (and other parts) quite like Elevator Guy.

She probably should call him something else in her head. Or at least, try to forget him. Because she hadn’t even heard him speak. She hadn’t quite brought herself to say hello.

If, by chance, he was some celebrity she didn’t recognize, then she would seem like Creepy Stalker Fan Girl, and that would make her horribly unprofessional. Right now, on this stupid mission from the North Pole, she felt unprofessional, so she didn’t need to do anything to reinforce that sense of herself.

She waved at the receptionist when she reached the part of the floor dedicated to the show. “Can I go in?” Nissa asked, and then proceeded to walk to the back without waiting for an answer. The mark of a permanent guest; no one stopped her when she walked past reception.

Behind the public areas, the halls were narrow, painted a dirty eggshell, and blocked by boxes and other things some intern needed to take care of three weeks ago. She let herself into a relatively large (by New York standards) office overlooking the plaza and its fountain. Tourists milled, hoping they could see celebrities or get into free show tapings, while New Yorkers picked their way past with expressions of great annoyance. She could empathize.

The city always got crowded during the holiday season—particularly in this part, near the skating rink and the big Christmas tree and Radio City Music Hall, all those things Flyover Country had heard about since the Christmas movies of the 1940s.

Caryn Longworth, the executive producer, sat behind her desk. She had a horsey, not-camera-ready face filled with intelligence so overpowering that one look in her eyes was terrifying. According to staff gossip, Caryn was related to at least two former US Presidents, several senators, and one famous hostess from the days when women didn’t serve in Congress. Caryn had the familial political brains, a rabid enthusiasm for government gossip, and a fine-tuned sense of news-as-entertainment.

Nissa loved her. They often went out for coffee together to discuss the day’s TV highlights. They weren’t quite best friends—neither of them felt like they were in the position to have best friends—but they would have been if they’d had different jobs.

“Please tell me this idiot professor has canceled,” Nissa said to Caryn.

“Oh, Nissie hasn’t done her homework,” Caryn said with a twinkle that rivaled the Big Guy’s. “Our professor is not an idiot by a long stretch.”

“I’ve done enough homework to know that,” Nissa said, although she hadn’t been able to download any of the shows he’d appeared on. She hadn’t had enough time.

“But apparently you haven’t seen enough to realize that you better bring your A game,” Caryn said seriously.

Nissa felt a half second of panic. Caryn had never said that to her. Caryn, in fact, said that Nissa’s B game was better than everyone else’s A game.

Caryn was, in some ways, her biggest fan.

“He’s here then,” Nissa said, pretending to misunderstand her friend.

“Oh, he’s here, along with his brilliance, his beauty, and his stellar Q rating.”

“What?” Nissa asked. “He has a Q Score?”

The Q Score was a metric that TV people in particular used to keep track of someone’s appeal to a particular audience. Personalities with high Q Scores got more invitations to appear on television than people with no Q Scores.

Santa had a Q Score as a brand and a cartoon figure, but not as a personality. Nissa had a Q Score as a personality and it was pretty good for someone with no actual video venue of her own.

“Our professor does have a Q Score,” Caryn said. “He had one before he ever went on TV.”

“How is that possible?” Nissa asked.

“One of the most popular YouTube videos of all time,” Caryn said. “You really haven’t done your homework on this one.”

Nissa felt her cheeks heat. “I just got assigned this yesterday,” she said. “And then I was away from any internet connection. I thought he was just some anti-Santa guy.”

“That’s what makes him great,” Caryn said. “He sounds so pro-Santa while being against everything that Santa does. He sounds like Dr. Oz or somebody, totally concerned with your health while basically saying you’re stupid just for breathing.”

“Great,” Nissa said under her breath. “Too bad Santa can’t rebut him.”

Santa would destroy him. Charm, charisma, the ability to make someone believe that even the silliest things were possible—that was the true magic of an S-Elf. If only Nissa could get Santa here for one media appearance.

Although, she knew, that would be completely impossible.

“Yes, it is too bad that Santa can’t rebut him,” Caryn said. “But you’d need Edmund Gwenn for that, wouldn’t you? And he’s been dead since what? The 1950s?”

Nissa frowned at her, thinking for a moment before understanding the reference. Edmund Gwenn had played Kris Kringle in the original movie version of Miracle on 34th Street. There was quite a back story to the performance. The entire movie existed because of Oskar. Oskar put a bug in the ear of somebody at Twentieth Century Fox to do a movie about the possibility of Santa being real. The movie was having difficulties until, in a very Ghost of Christmas Present maneuver, Oskar took Gwenn to the North Pole to meet the real Santa, all the while letting Gwenn think he dreamed the whole thing.

Santa nearly blew it all by showing up at the Oscars while on vacation. When Gwenn won for his performance, Santa had shaken his hand on the way up to the stage. Now I know there is a Santa Claus! Gwenn exclaimed when he won, and everyone thought he meant that he was referring to the award, when actually, he was referring to the Jolly Old Elf who had just shaken his hand.

“Nissa?” Caryn asked.

“Sorry,” Nissa said. “Wool-gathering.”

“Well, you shouldn’t,” Caryn said. “You should use that fancy tablet of yours to watch what you’re up against. This guy is disarming, and he’s funny, and one of the sexiest guests we’ve had.”

“It’s not hard to get that appellation on this show,” Nissa said, referring to the fact that most guests on Made-up Controversies Are Us were on the political side and therefore were not incredibly attractive by TV standards.

“Still,” Caryn said. “You’ve got less than an hour to prepare.”

“You just want good TV,” Nissa said.

“Damn straight,” Caryn said, “and I’m afraid this guy’s going to eat you for lunch.”

4

RYAN HAD A system for getting through makeup.

He slept. Or pretended to. That way, he wouldn’t think about eyeliner, foundation, lip gloss, and someone else clipping the stray hairs that had sprouted on his ears and nose since puberty. It was embarrassing and, he believed, just a bit below his dignity. Early on in this publicity ordeal, he developed the opinion that the reason TV people were so vapid was because they had inhaled makeup fumes each moment of every day.

Then he realized that he was being unfair to all the behind-the-scenes folks who were generally nice and usually as smart as his B students. It was the talking heads that annoyed him.

He got the secondary makeup room treatment, or maybe it was the tertiary makeup room treatment. He wasn’t quite up on the levels of makeup rooms. He only knew that the Talent—the regular on-air folk—usually got made-up elsewhere, and The Big Names often had a makeup room all to themselves as well.

In the past four weeks, he’d shared makeup moments with aspiring models, people who’d just been kicked off their reality TV shows, up-and-coming politicians, and other professors who seemed to make a living expounding on one thing or another.

He’d asked one professor from Fordham how he handled the interview thing, and the prof had smiled at him. If I didn’t live near the city, the prof said, I’d never do this. But it impresses the students.

He didn’t say it sold more books. He did say it lead to more appearances, like never-ending circles of hell, although the hell part was just Ryan’s personal opinion.

And Ryan didn’t need to impress more students. His best friend Jim, a constitutional law professor, said Ryan was already the campus’s Indiana Jones. Ryan had objected to that: he didn’t go to faraway places to steal antiquities, and he didn’t look like a young Harrison Ford.

Then, a week or so after the comparison, a female student had shown up in his class with I love you, Professor Palmer written in florid red ink on her considerable cleavage, and he had realized that Jim was right.

Things would only get worse now.

Even though Ryan was terribly exhausted, he couldn’t really sleep while someone brushed some kind of powder on his face to keep down the shine. It was all he could do to prevent himself from sneezing.

“Stop moving your eyes, Dr. Palmer,” the makeup artist said. So she knew he was awake. “I’m done with them, but your beautiful lashes are getting in my way.”

His girl-lashes, or so his brother used to call them. Ryan opened his eyes and saw himself in the mirror, wrapped in a protective green garment that reminded him of a hospital gown, his face half-made-up like a badly designed manufacturer’s dummy.

Movement behind him caught his eye. Who should show up, but Gorgeous Elevator Woman. She looked even better in this light.

“Nissa!” the makeup artist said. “Don’t tell me you’re on today?”

“For my sins,” Gorgeous Elevator Woman said. She had a throaty alto voice with a touch of an accent. Scandinavian? German? He couldn’t quite tell.

“Someone trying to ban Christmas?” the hairstylist in the corner asked.

“Something like that,” Gorgeous Elevator Woman said as she grabbed one of the green garments. She was clearly comfortable here. Ryan wasn’t. And he suspected he was the Christmas-banner that she was referring to.

Ryan sank deep in his chair. He didn’t want to see her at all. Beautiful, sure of herself, and another talking head. He thought he had seen intelligence in those eyes. He had been convinced of it. He wondered what her game was.

She couldn’t be a regular or she wouldn’t be in this makeup room. He wanted to close his eyes again and pretend he was asleep, but the makeup artist decided at that moment to put mascara on his lashes. He hated that. His lashes were long enough, thank you very much. His sister envied his lashes. No one needed to accent them.

His cheeks warmed as Gorgeous Elevator Woman sat in the chair next to him. It turned slightly away from him, so he couldn’t quite see her face.

“Too hot, Doctor Palmer?” the makeup artist asked. “Because if you’re going to be this red under the lights, I need to tone down your makeup.”

She needed to tone down his hormones. Just being this close to Gorgeous Elevator Woman was revving him up.

“I’m—okay—um—you know,” he said, sounding as inarticulate as he felt. As if the day could get any worse. That’s what he needed. He needed to make a fool of himself on national television.

“I’m going to reapply your base,” the makeup artist said. “We’ll tone you down just a bit. We want you to look pretty for the viewers.”

Pretty. With his long girl-lashes and the craters underneath his eyes. Pretty with a hint of stubble. He felt the warmth in his cheeks turn to a full-fledge forest fire.

If he’d ever had any hope of impressing Gorgeous Elevator Woman, it was gone now. She would see him as a red-faced, tongue-tied bumbler, the way that all women had seen him since he first noticed the opposite sex in the sixth grade.

He tried not to sigh heavily. He tried to focus on something else. But all he could see in the mirror was his red face bobbing up from his green wrap, and Gorgeous Elevator Woman swiveling her chair to get a good look at him.

5

SHE RECOGNIZED THE Voice-voice a second after the name registered: Doctor Palmer, hater of Christmas, Santa’s arch enemy, at least this season, the professor with an agenda and a Q Score unrivaled in the ranks of professors since the beginning of television.

Nissa swiveled her chair to get a good look at him, and froze when she saw the handsome man she’d met on the elevator. The man who made George Clooney look like a starvation victim. The man who made Ewan McGregor seem hobbit-sized. The man who made her heart go pitter-pat for fifteen minutes after she left him behind.

Oh, dear. He had a high Q Score with her too. And Caryn was right: that meant trouble.

But Nissa had to play this like the professional she was. Her job rested on it. If she were feeling dramatic, she could say that the future of Christmas rested on it.

She extended her hand, thankful she’d at least gotten a manicure before she went to the Pole.

“Doctor Palmer, I presume?” she asked with the right bit of wry amusement.

He looked at her hand as if it were slathered with mud. Then he raised those miraculous blue eyes to hers—eyes that rivaled Paul Newman’s in his heyday—and closed them so fast that he got mascara dust on his high cheekbones.

“Professor Palmer,” he said, then shook his head a little as if he were uncomfortable with that. “Ryan Palmer. Um. Just Ryan, really, because I’m not much with formality.”

He still hadn’t taken her hand. She had never faced this situation before. Did she withdraw it? Did she wait?

“Nissa Kealoha,” she said. “I’m with Claus & Company. I understand we’ll be arguing opposite sides this afternoon.”

“I’m not really a side-taker,” he said. “I just—people are misunderstanding my book, that’s all, and they focus on what they understand, which is Santa, and then they use it for their own ends.”

His Voice-voice was warmer in person, and the humble-man act made him even more enticing. She tried to be clinical about this: He had charisma, which was a form of magic, and that voice was enough to make her keenly aware of parts of her body that shouldn’t be speaking up right now.

She eased her hand back, as she slowly realized she didn’t want to touch him. Touching him right now might make her combust.

She had never reacted to a man like this, never in all her years. She wanted to ask him what kind of magic he had, then decided against it. She’d learned in all her years in the Greater World that there were a lot of people here who had magic and didn’t know it. She suspected he was one of them.

“I see,” she said, keeping her tone as neutral as possible, “so you don’t really believe that Santa has an unhealthy lifestyle.”

He glanced at Susie, the makeup artist. She was watching him with bemusement. “Um,” he said, that Voice-voice shaking. “I don’t believe that Santa has a lifestyle at all. He is a fictional character.”

“Not to millions of children,” Nissa said as coldly as she could manage. “They see him as a friend, a father-figure, a magical hero. They really don’t need to hear that he has troubles at home or he overeats or he’s an alcoholic. I think we’re spending too much time destroying the icons of childhood at the expense of childhood, don’t you?”

Ryan Palmer blinked at her. The mascara Susie had put on him had flaked all over his face. “I—um—that’s your argument? Don’t you think our role models should be, well, role models?”

She frowned at him. He seemed to be as off-balance as she was. If she could keep him that way, she could destroy this threat in a single interview.

“And that’s your argument, Professor? Really? Because it seems critical of children. Maybe you think Tony the Tiger should stop yelling or The Cat in the Hat should be a bit less disruptive. Maybe Sesame Street should stop showing beloved puppets living in garbage cans.”

“Save it for the show,” Susie said. “I’ve got a face to clean up and not enough time to do it.”

She bent over Professor Palmer with determination.

“You’re harder to make up than you look,” she said to him.

Cedric, Nissa’s makeup artist, powdered her face. “At least you know what you’re doing, doll,” he said to Nissa. “I love working on a beautiful woman who knows her makeup. We’ll have you out of here in a jiff.”

“Thanks, Ced,” she said, and turned her chair away from Palmer. Handsome, distracting, and fake-humble. He was going to be a problem. Plus, he ruined her research time. She had planned to watch her tablet while she got made-up. Now she’d simply be showing this guy how unfamiliar she was with his shtick.

She’d have to wait until she got to the green room, and hope that Susie would take a lot of time with Palmer, so that he wouldn’t join her until the show was about to begin.

By then, maybe she’d have better arguments than Tony the Tiger and The Cat in the Hat. Tony the Tiger, after all, was brand-specific, and the Cat in the Hat came from dimly remembered children’s books. She needed something more current, something stronger.

And she wasn’t quite sure how to do it.

6

GORGEOUS ELEVATOR WOMAN, whom he now knew as Nissa, was long gone before the makeup artist finished with Ryan. She had to redo his palette (her words) three times before she got it right. By then, he had ten minutes to put on the silk suit Wendy darling had provided for him, and skate into the green room.

His stomach was rumbling. He was so hungry he was woozy—or maybe that was just the lack of sleep.

Or the effects of the woman of his dreams.

Damn, he wished he could think of her in a different way. But Nissa had put him off balance from the start.

He arrived in the green room as the three hosts of this show started into a discussion of icons, role models, and traditions. A table near the door was laden with holiday cookies, fresh fruit, chips and dip, and little finger sandwiches. His stomach growled in appreciation—rather like Tony the Tiger—but he remembered Wendy’s admonition: he didn’t want any of this stuff in his teeth, not while he was facing the most beautiful woman in the world.

He hoped he made it through his fifteen-minute segment. Then he’d be able to grab an apple, run to the limo, and hide in his hotel room.

Unless Wendy darling had other surprises for him.

Nissa the Beautiful wasn’t in the green room. Or she wasn’t in this green room. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Several of the shows he’d guested on separated their guests until show time. That way the arguments were fresh.

He wished he had thought to use his phone to look up Claus & Company. He’d never heard of it before, although he felt like he should have. Something seemed a little off about it.

Or maybe he just wished it were off. Nissa had managed to unsettle him, and he didn’t want to go on TV rattled.

A production assistant he’d never seen before, clutching a ubiquitous tablet and wearing a pair of wireless headphones around her neck like jewelry, leaned in the door. “Ready, Doctor Palmer?”

“As I’ll ever be,” he said with a guaranteed food-free smile.

He took a deep breath and followed the PA through the door. He hadn’t even known that acronym a month ago, and now he understood that good PAs were his best friend. This PA led him around the two gigantic cameras into the small studio.

An audience awaited, which surprised him. He didn’t think afternoon faux-news chat shows had audiences. He’d only seen audiences on afternoon shows like Ellen.

But he had long ago given up the fantasy of watching the shows before he guested on them. He was about to give up the fantasy of sleep. His stomach, however, hadn’t given up the fantasy of food.

Then his eyes found the real fantasy.

She wore the same dress, but in this light, it moved like a decorative piece of art. It accented her breasts, minimized her hips, and made her legs look even longer. She had dumped her tablet somewhere.

She matched steps with him from the opposite side of the studio. Plus she looked a hundred times more confident than he felt. She probably wasn’t hungry or tired either. She looked like a woman ready for battle.

He felt like a man who needed his Christmas vacation to start right now.

The smattering of applause registered only because he saw the red “applause” light as he walked to the empty center chairs. He and the Beautiful Nissa would sit next to each other while they battled over imaginary holiday creatures. He didn’t like that either.

Behind them, a green screen showed…green. He wondered what people in the booth would design as the backdrop, and decided he didn’t want to know. The people in the production booth could make him seem brilliant or ridiculous with the words they put beneath his name on the crawl. They could do worse damage by placing images of tearful children facing Santa Claus on that green screen behind him.

The hosts, two men and two women, all stood. He recognized all of them from the nightly newscast. One was the in-house medical expert, Doctor Patsy Rayder, who (he thought) had a my-way-or-the-highway vibe. She was shorter than he expected. Next to her stood the show’s host, Joseph Becker, a slick silver-haired talking head who always seemed to be gunning for the latest controversy.

They both reached out to Ryan as they guided him to the correct chair. He wasn’t able to greet the other two until he sat down.

Next to Nissa.

Who smiled at him, and made him shiver with delight.

Dammit.

The other two nodded their hellos. The show’s cohost, Adele Grippa, a tall artic blond with cold eyes, and the studio’s media expert, Erik Naiten, both smiled as if they had caught him in a trap.

Ryan should have eaten a cookie, if only for the fifteen minutes of fortitude.

He’d already missed his introduction, not that he needed to hear it again. They would have rehashed the YouTube video, maybe shown a clip, held up his book (which was sitting innocuously on the end table beside Joseph), and talked about the “controversy” he was stirring up.

What he felt bad about was missing Nissa’s introduction. He had no real idea who she was, and that always made for a bad debate.

Adele Grippa leaned forward, welcomed him to the show, and launched right in.

“Doctor Palmer, in some circles, they’re calling you the man who hates Santa Claus,” she said. “What do you think of that?”

And by the way, how often do you beat your wife? He hated loaded questions.

He smiled, hoping the smile wasn’t as cold as he felt. He said, “I’m a professor of public health who used to be a gap-toothed little boy, giddy with delight on Christmas morning, hoping that Santa arrived. I don’t hate Santa. In fact, I think Santa is an extremely important icon, or I wouldn’t have used him as just one example in my book.”

He should have said the book’s title, Healthful Imagery, but he was feeling rebellious. He didn’t look at Wendy in the audience, even though she was probably mouthing the title just to set him off.

Instead, his gaze caught Nissa’s next to him. She raised one eyebrow, a skill he had tried and failed to learn after watching his first Star Trek episode.

“Important?” Nissa asked in that rich voice, with that sexy, sexy accent. “Do you always attack important people, Doctor?”

And do you try to stab your wife after beating her, Doctor? He was on the ropes before he even had a chance to open his mouth. Time to change the direction of the conversation, and no matter how much he disliked being here or how greatly he was attracted to the gorgeous woman beside him, he had a job to do.

“I wrote the book Healthful Imagery because of my concern about the state of public health in America,” he said, foregoing any mention of Santa Claus at all and getting the title in, not for Wendy, but because he was annoyed. “Almost twenty percent of our children are obese. Not overweight. Obese. They have heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure—the diseases of late adulthood—before they reach puberty. This is a public health crisis—”

“We’re well aware of that, Doctor,” Joseph Becker said as if Ryan had just pissed on his shoes. “We’re not here to discuss that. We’re here to discuss your attitude toward Santa Claus.”

Ryan had stepped into an alternate universe. A news-talk program didn’t want to talk about a real issue? They wanted to talk about a made-up icon? Really?

Nissa turned that sexy eyebrow on Becker, and her other eyebrow joined it. She seemed as startled as Ryan was.

“I love Santa Claus,” Ryan said. “If you pick up my book, you’ll see that statement on page 157.”

He knew the page because he’d been in this circle of hell before.

“If you look at the index in the back of the book, you’ll see that I devote three pages out of 387 to the imagery we use to describe one of our great childhood icons. The rest of the book is about the ways we can retrain our thinking to help our children grow up healthy—”

“Imagery has nothing to do with health,” Doctor Rayder snapped. “Any good doctor knows that health is a collection of facts and figures, not fantasy. It—”

“Exactly, Doctor,” Ryan said. He was not going to be the butt of this conversation. “That’s why I’m concerned about the 12.5 million children who are obese in this country. Fact, figure, reality. It’s important.”

“Yet, you spend all your time attacking Santa Claus,” Grippa said snidely.

“Actually,” Nissa said, loud enough to quell the cross-talk. “I’ve been watching Doctor Palmer on his media tour. He doesn’t attack Santa Claus. He questions Santa’s habits.”

The panel was stunned into silence. He was stunned into silence. Nissa the Beautiful had, after all, been brought in to argue with him, and instead, she was defending him.

“In other words,” she said, clearly aware of the effect she had had on the panel, “he has a point.”

“A point?” Grippa asked, her tone even colder. Five minutes ago, Ryan wouldn’t have thought that possible. “Aren’t you supposed to defend Santa Claus, Ms. Kealoha? Your company Claus & Company seems rather protective of his brand.”

“We are,” Nissa said with incredible cheerfulness. “And we certainly don’t want Santa’s brand to be associated with things that harm children.”

“Are you saying that eggnog harms children?” Becker asked, sounding more befuddled than angry.

“Well,” Nissa said, “eggnog usually has rum in it, and I for one don’t believe in giving children alcohol, do you?”

Ryan had the urge to giggle. He hadn’t had the urge to giggle since he was six, maybe younger. Some of that was sleep deprivation and hunger, but the rest of it was sheer surprise.

And relief.

He really hadn’t expected anyone to take his side on national television, certainly not a woman who had brought up Tony the Tiger and Sesame Street as rebuttal witnesses not an hour ago.

“I didn’t say I wanted to give children alcohol,” Becker was saying.

Everyone was talking over him, and the panel was getting louder. The audience, barely visible under the lights, was leaning forward, and even the camera crew seemed riveted. But Ryan’s gaze was on Nissa. She had a small smile on her face. She was enjoying the chaos.

Then she winked at him.

His breath caught. He hadn’t expected that at all.

“There’s no need to fight,” Nissa said over the bickering panel. “Doctor Ryan is talking about very real problems in his book and on his videos. He’s talking about public health, for gosh sake’s, and while most people find that phrase rather dull, it’s important as all get-out.”

Gosh sakes? All get out? Who said those things? Maybe it was like an adult man almost saying goodie to a limo driver.

That urge to giggle returned. And he hadn’t even had a drop of eggnog.

“I try to make the topic interesting,” Ryan said to her as if they were alone over dinner. “And maybe I went too far with the Santa example. I—”

“You never go too far when you get the attention of the public,” Nissa the Beautiful said. “I personally think it’s time to re-examine some of Santa’s brand. After all, he’s all about helping children, and we certainly don’t want to help them into a diabetic coma.”

“No, we don’t,” Ryan said, “but we don’t want to jettison Santa with the bathwater either.”

He was mixing metaphors, but no one mentioned it.

“Actually, Santa can be very useful here,” Nissa said. “The commercialization of Santa Claus has gotten worse in the last fifty years. When you think of the Ed Gwenn version of Kris Kringle, he wasn’t too fat, he didn’t overindulge, and he had a very gentle magic. I think if we return to that, children will still relate, and they won’t get the wrong message about greed and overeating. That message disturbs—I mean, would disturb—Santa greatly. I think he would be happy to return to the 1940s version of his image.”

Ryan frowned just a little. She spoke a bit too much like a true believer, as if Santa really existed. Although if Ryan worked with branding Santa day-in and day-out, the image might become reality for him as well.

“You’re saying he’s right?” Grippa asked Nissa, sounding stunned.

“Yes, I am,” Nissa said calmly.

“Media images can be extremely powerful.” Erik Naiten jumped in, clearly feeling like he needed his fifteen seconds of fame this afternoon.

Ryan was happy to let Naiten talk. He couldn’t really focus on what the man was saying; instead, Ryan was getting lost in those dark, slightly upturned eyes beside him. Nissa lowered her lashes slightly, like a satisfied cat.

“If Santa were real,” Becker said with startling belligerence, “why would he let any problems exist? Poverty, hopelessness, war? I know that kids ask year after year for solutions to those things, and Santa never gives them.”

“Santa has magic.” Nissa’s tone was practiced, as if she had said this a lot. “He isn’t a deity, and he can’t change behavior. His magic is very specific and Christmas-oriented. He also can only work with children whose families want his presence. If the parents don’t celebrate Christmas, then he’s not going to impose it on them. Slowly, he’s been trying to change the practice of gift-giving to help the impoverished—wishing trees, presents given through charitable functions—but he can’t do everything.”

“He’s something we make up,” Doctor Rayder said. Clearly, she was bitter about the pounding she had taken earlier. “Can’t we change how he does business?”

“That’s what we’re discussing, isn’t it?” Ryan asked. “Small changes in his personal habits. We can’t make large changes in the image or more kids will get disappointed. We can’t expect our fictional creations to save the world, no matter how much we want them to.”

“Good point,” Naiten said, and launched into some study of disappointments growing in the holiday season.

Nissa seemed to pay attention, but Ryan couldn’t focus. At least, not on the discussion. It was different from all the others he’d had in the past few weeks, and he was grateful for that. It had kept him awake. Although, he probably would have been awake even with the same old discussion so long as Nissa was beside him.

A beautiful woman was galvanizing, even if she was out of his league. Even if she hadn’t defended him—which she had.

“…thank our guests, Doctor Ryan Palmer and Nissa Kealoha,” Becker was saying. “After the break, we’ll be talking about the latest Congressional sex scandal with Congressman Polk of…”

The interview was over. Ryan could have dinner. Lunch. Whatever meal he had missed. The schedule Wendy had given him had nothing on tap until five A.M. tomorrow morning, when he’d be back in this building for five minutes with six department store Santas. It was billed as a light moment on the morning show.

Ryan didn’t know if he could do light, but he could do five minutes. Tomorrow.

The red light on top of the cameras went off, and assistants seemed to appear from every corner. The audience murmured, as if they were afraid to talk out loud.

Ryan stood as Wendy appeared from behind one of the cameras. He recognized the determined look on her face, and cringed inwardly.

“Well, that was a weird segment,” Grippa said as a makeup assistant touched up her cheeks. No one answered her. Naiten had already exited stage right, and Doctor Rayder leaned in to Ryan.

“What is your degree in, Doctor?” she asked, expecting to hear he had only a Ph.D. like Dr. Phil.

“I have a medical degree from Columbia,” he said with the same tone. “And yours, Doctor? Where did you get yours?”

She grunted and walked past him.

“My,” Nissa said. “She’s touchy.”

“When people feel the need to compare degrees, they’re usually status conscious,” Ryan said, sounding like a pompous ass and immediately regretting it.

“Apparently, you won that fight,” Nissa said.

“Nis,” Becker said, almost shoving Ryan aside. “What was that? I thought you’re Santa’s biggest defender.”

“Oh, I am, Joseph,” she said. “That’s why I’m paying attention to Doctor Palmer here. He’s a smart man.”

“Yeah, right,” Becker said, as if Ryan weren’t there at all. “It takes all kinds to make a show. Using Santa like that.”

“If I’d known it would have brought me here,” Ryan said, not caring anymore, “I would have used a less controversial example.”

“You don’t like being on TV?” Becker asked as if Ryan had some kind of disease. “Nis thrives on it, don’t you, Nis?”

“Not like you do,” she said.

Becker leaned in, shoving Ryan for real this time. “We’ll get you a real segment next time. Maybe just the two of us—”

“Not necessary,” Nissa said, dodging his hands.

“Thirty seconds,” one of the PA s said.

“Ryan, let’s go,” Wendy said from her spot near the camera. He pretended not to hear her.

If he walked to “his” green room, he’d have to go right past her. So he pivoted and walked off-set in the opposite direction.

“You have your own personal stalker?” Nissa asked. She was walking beside him. Apparently she didn’t miss anything.

“No,” he said. “Wendy’s running this tour, and I’m pretty sure she added something to today’s schedule. I’m working off fumes, and if I don’t eat something soon, I’m not sure I’ll make it another hour.”

“I’d suggest the restaurant on the lower level below the plaza, but it’s a see-and-be-seen place. There’s a nice pub about half a block away. Makes a great burger. A lot of news people used to go there, when there were actual reporters doing the news.”

Ryan smiled at her. “Thank you. I’m not as familiar with the neighborhood as I used to be—”

“I’ll walk you there. I could use a beer,” she said.

She was going with him? Really? He blinked and almost told her it wasn’t necessary, and it wasn’t. But oh, it was desirable.

“I’ll just grab my coat, if I can find it,” he said.

“Let me come with you. I’ll see if I can fend off your stalker.” She smiled at him as they slipped out of the studio.

Behind him, someone counted down. “Three…Two…One…”

And then applause.

Ryan felt like a marionette whose strings had just been cut. He really was exhausted. He walked into this green room. The food here had been well noshed, but he managed two sugar cookies and a bottle of water.

A makeup artist waited. “Ms. Kealoha, would you like to remove your makeup?”

“I’m sure Doctor Palmer would as well,” Nissa said, as she walked over.

He was munching on a cookie. “Ryan,” he said. “Please. ‘Doctor Palmer’ sounds so pretentious.”

“It’s your name, isn’t it?” Nissa said.

“I’m a professor,” he said. “I prefer Professor Palmer, but Wendy—that’s the woman you’re calling my stalker—she insists on Doctor.”

“Because she says it’s more impressive,” Nissa said, rubbing her face with some kind of cloth. “And for a TV audience, it is. I think you surprised Dr. Rayder when you had a real medical degree.”

“Not as much as I surprised my father,” Ryan said. The cookie tasted like a little bit of heaven. And it vanished in a nanosecond, followed by the other cookie.

He grabbed a third before the makeup artist gave him one of those magic cloths to wipe off his face. A shower would be good too.

“I appreciate the directions,” Ryan said to Nissa, “but you don’t have to come with me.”

“Rethinking dinner?” she asked, and she sounded casual. He couldn’t see her face, but something in her tone was at odds with her body language.

Dinner. So lunch was the meal he’d missed. Dinner sounded date-like. Dinner sounded important.

He wasn’t up for important, not with the most beautiful woman in the world. “I just don’t want you to feel obligated.”

Nissa smiled as she picked up her coat, her bag, and her tablet. “I feel hungry,” she said. “I always forget how much energy it takes to fend off Becker.”

“You can say that again,” the makeup artist said softly.

Ryan looked at her. She shrugged.

“Some people should be tied to a chair when they get their makeup put on,” she said. “And I don’t mean that in a Fifty Shades of Grey way.”

She picked up the cloths. His coat rested next to them. He hadn’t seen anyone bring it in.

“I’ll waylay your Wendy woman,” the makeup artist said. “But exit quickly, because I hear heels.”

“Thank you,” Ryan said. He blinked in surprise. “People are so nice here.”

“Some of them,” Nissa said. “Should we go?”

He nodded, then grabbed a fourth cookie. “For the road,” he said, holding it up.

7

NISSA HAD NO idea what had gotten into her, both on air and off. She just hadn’t wanted to hear that pig Becker attacking Doctor—Professor—Palmer. Ryan. (He said to call him Ryan.) She hadn’t liked the way everyone was going after Ryan, even though she had intended to go after him just like that thirty seconds before.

And then the invitation to dinner. Not just anywhere either, but one of her favorite restaurants. An almost-secret place. Certainly not somewhere Becker knew about, or anyone else on staff, not even Caryn. Nissa often went there as a reward for dealing with Becker. She usually tried to escape before he could talk to her.

She usually succeeded.

Only this time, she had waited around for Ryan, like a fan girl at the stage door.

Her mistake.

And now she was helping him escape from his publicist, which probably wasn’t a good idea. People like him were usually on such a tight schedule that they knocked over every single domino when they went rogue for as much as an hour.

As if that were her problem.

Her problem was that she found this guy incredibly appealing, and she had just agreed with him, when her mission was to take him down.

She swallowed hard, then turned and smiled at him. He was walking beside her, munching a cookie like it was a lifeline. Some glitter from the frosting rested on his upper lip, making him look a tiny bit human.

Did he realize how ridiculous it was for him to eat cookies after he had just traveled all over the country criticizing Santa for doing the same thing?

Probably not. He looked hungry. And more than hungry. He was still the most gorgeous man she had ever seen. With that dark hair, that voice, and those soft eyes, he couldn’t get any more attractive—at least to her. The glitter didn’t detract from his looks. In fact, the glitter made her want to run her hand along his mouth, removing glitter just before she kissed him.

Her cheeks warmed. She turned away, hoping he wouldn’t see that, or at least, he would attribute it to the pace they were taking through the hallway. She reached the stairs and pushed the door open, hoping she didn’t knock some research assistant aside á là Broadcast News.

Ryan gave one quick glance at the elevator banks not far away, and then followed her. “Good thinking,” he said. “I’m not sure Wendy even knows stairs exist.”

Nissa let out a laugh, surprising herself. “These stairs shouldn’t be attempted in heels of more than one inch.”

Yet, here she was, wearing her winter stilettos. They had a bit of padding on the inside, and reinforced toes that protected her feet from snow. Plus they were easy to pull off. But they were still stilettos.

Which reminded her. She stopped on the next landing, slipped off her right shoe, and dumped it in her bag, standing half barefoot on the cold concrete floor. Then she removed the other shoe, dumping it in her bag. She put on her slip-on boots, still stylish, but New-York-in-winter stylish, not North-Pole stylish (because North-Pole stylish involved real fur).

He watched her like he’d never seen anything like this before. His eyes twinkled, or maybe that was a reflection of the glitter.

Still, he didn’t say anything, and she felt just a little stupid for wearing fashionable shoes in the first place.

She turned away, heading down the stairs. He clattered behind her. If people were listening—which they rarely did around here—they would hear the two of them coming.

Finally, Nissa burst through the door into the lobby, looked both ways, and didn’t see the publicist. She beckoned Ryan as if they were spies sneaking into a summit.

The lobby was full, as it always was, with milling fans, locals, and people who actually belonged here, many of whom walked with their heads down so that they couldn’t be recognized.

Nissa wasn’t fooled; if the famous didn’t want to be recognized, they would have used a less public entrance. She took out her day pass and ran it through the scanner, a rule she always hated—approval going in, and approval coming out.

She turned to make sure Ryan did the same thing. He fumbled with his pass, but he made it.

They scurried across the lobby, nearly bumping into the new host of the network’s late night show as he carried a cardboard tray of specialty coffees just like an intern.

Great camouflage, that. She’d have to remember it for her own clients.

She slipped on her coat as she hurried through the main doors. The cold caressed her like an old friend. She held the door for Ryan, who was putting a coat over his silk suit. The coat was definitely down-market from the suit—at least $1000 down. She wondered if he knew. He didn’t seem to.

They crossed the plaza, skirted the fountain (shut off for the winter), moved around the famous rink and its skaters, and went down a nearby alley.

“Jeez,” Ryan said as they turned down another alley. “I feel like Harrison Ford in the Fugitive. The next thing you know, I’ll be blaming everything on the one-armed man.”

“You’re cuter,” she blurted, and then wished she hadn’t.

“Than the one-armed man?” Ryan said. “I would hope so.”

She meant than Ford, but she decided not to clarify. They reached the entrance to the pub—or at least, the stairs leading to the entrance. It was on the basement level of another large skyscraper, and the pub’s owner paid for the outdoor entrance at his own expense.

He also kept it up—no ice on the stairs, which, considering this winter already, was pretty impressive.

She always felt like she was entering Cheers when she went in, even though she knew that fictional bar was in Boston. The angle was the same, though, and every time she entered from the deep cold to the enveloping beer-scented warmth of the wood interior, she half expected someone to shout “Norm!”

“Nice,” Ryan said as they stepped inside. “This has been here a while. I wonder why I never knew about it.”

“Most tourists don’t,” she said.

He gave her a disparaging look, and she suddenly remembered his tone with Doctor Rayder. He had gone to Columbia, which wasn’t that far from here.

“And,” she added, hoping to cover her mistake, “impoverished medical students probably couldn’t afford this place.”

“Nice try,” Ryan said with a smile, “but you didn’t quite pull away from the faux pas.”

He looked around, while she grasped for something to say.

Then he added, “I suspect impoverished professors can’t afford this place either.”

“Professors who wear silk suits should be able to afford anything,” she said.

He looked sheepish. “The university is fronting the publicist, and I assume they’re paying for the clothes because I’m not. I was told I couldn’t go into public looking like a refugee from the 1990s.”

“Is that the last time you bought a suit?” Nissa asked as she grabbed two menus and led them into the dim darkness at the back. The best tables were near the gas fireplace, not because it was warm, but because it was private.

“I don’t remember the last time I bought a suit,” Ryan said, pulling a chair out for her as if he did that for women every day of his life. “But I do remember the last time I wore a suit. It was for my brother’s wedding, and the damn thing was purple.”

“The wedding?”

“Almost,” he said. “Their colors were purple and white.”

“Like TCU?” she asked.

“Like Northwestern,” he said. “Where they met.”

“Uck,” she said. “I’d have to get married in Christmas colors.”

He looked at her in surprise. “I didn’t think there were schools with red and green.”

“Not famous ones,” she said, covering.

“Well, I’m not getting married in Columbia blue and white,” he said, looking around. “Should I go up and get us something to drink?”

“Someone’ll be here in a minute,” she said.

“Let’s hope the cookies hold out that long,” he said.

Nissa grinned and slipped him a tin of bar nuts. “You know, I should have taken a picture of you eating those cookies.”

He smiled. Which softened his face, and made him seem less handsome, more approachable. “I never said there was anything wrong with cookies.”

“Yes, you did,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I think cookies, like everything else, are fine in moderation.”

He slid the bar nuts back toward her.

“Not feeling moderate about bar snacks?” she asked.

“I had a friend who used to sneeze in those. Deliberately,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “You’ve had some lovely friends.”

He grinned. “I could lie and say the ‘he’ in question was my brother. But that’s not true. Those friends were mostly like my brother. Or my students, if you prefer.”

She heard something wistful in his voice. She was good at tones. She frowned. “Are you homesick?”

He shrugged, but his gaze no longer met hers. Then he shook his head, as if he were having a conversation with himself. “I…this sounds so stupid.”

She waited. She’d learned long ago that responding to a statement like that would derail the conversation.

“I…” he sighed. “I didn’t know what I signed on for.”

“The travel?” she asked.

“The insanity.” He looked up at her. “I know you work in this profession, and I don’t mean to insult you, but everyone seems to be trying to gin up a controversy, and then when they have that controversy it rises to new levels of crazy as the time goes on. I mean, we’re talking about Santa Claus as if he’s real.”

She stiffened in spite of herself.

“To millions of little children, he is,” she said. Not to mention that he was real, just not quite in the way the rest of the world thought.

“I know, I know,” Ryan said. “And had I known that using him as an example would turn my life upside down, I wouldn’t have done it.”

She leaned back just a little, feeling confused. “Don’t you believe what you’ve been saying? Don’t you believe that Santa’s image is hurting children?”

His right hand clenched for just a moment, and then it relaxed, almost as if it had never happened.

“I never said that.” His voice was calm, despite his physical reaction. “I said that Santa’s image needs to be revised with the modern era in mind—and you defended that position not an hour ago.”

Nissa felt the heat in her face increase. She hadn’t blushed like this in years. If ever. He was right; she had defended that position, and it could get her into a lot of trouble.

She had had a moment of panic, thinking he didn’t even believe what he had been saying, when she had put so much on the line. She had misunderstood.

A waitress hovered over them. Nissa hadn’t even seen her arrive.

“I need a burger,” Ryan was saying. “Charred. Grilled to death. So well done that we all know the damn thing is dead. And instead of fries, a salad, up front if you can do that.”

“A burger, Mr. Health Nut?” Nissa couldn’t help herself. She found his food choices amusing, especially since he was so judgmental about Santa’s.

“That’s Professor Health Nut to you,” Ryan said, “and I indulge at times. I even stress-eat. I’m aware of it, and I’m trying to deal with it. But I give myself some treats on days like today. I bow to the public health concerns by eating the burger well cooked. No e-coli for this guy.”

“Or for anyone else here,” the waitress said, sounding offended. “We get hundreds on our health inspections, and before you open your tourist blowhole again, we don’t pay for those rankings neither. We run a clean place.”

Ryan looked startled. Nissa felt bad for him. She hadn’t meant to open that door. She didn’t want everyone to pile on.

He said to the waitress, “I wasn’t implying that you ran a dirty restaurant. I’m just—”

“Oh, you was implying it,” she said. “You was actually kinda stating it. You like this guy?”

She asked that last of Nissa, whom she obviously recognized as a regular.

“I just met him,” Nissa said. “But I do—”

“And you brung him here, la-di-frickin-da. Ain’t we lucky?” The waitress sighed. “He’s this fussy about a burger, you gotta wonder what he’s like in the sack, you know?”

Oh, Nissa did wonder. Nissa had to work to keep from looking at Ryan. She wasn’t sure if this would amuse him or insult him more.

“You having your usual?” The waitress asked.

“Yes,” Nissa said.

The waitress pointed the pen at Ryan. “And you. That burger’ll be dead. I promise.”

She stalked off. Ryan shook his head, and then put a hand over his forehead. He looked exhausted.

“I’m sorry,” Nissa said. “I didn’t mean to start that.”

“I’m so tired that I don’t know what I’m saying half the time. I’m not—fussy—usually, just—God, I’ve missed New York.”

Nissa blinked. She hadn’t expected that. “What?”

He let his hand drop. He was grinning. “People here say what they think. In the real world anyway. In the TV world, it’s all about the controversy, but here, you know where you stand.”

He looked at the swinging kitchen door, and his smile grew wider.

“And there’s nowhere I’ll ever be able to stand that will impress her. If I come here for years, she’ll give me an overcooked burger, and she’ll give me crap about it.”

Nissa smiled too. “Yeah, she will. Let’s just hope the burger’s not tough.”

“In a good restaurant, well-cooked hamburger will be just as good as undercooked. And if it’s not, I’m ready to eat the bar nuts. I don’t care who sneezed on them.” His grin faded. “I’m sorry I sound like a pompous ass. I’m dying of hunger. Except for cookies and a slice at the airport, I’ve eaten nothing since LA.”

“You started in LA this morning?” That was a long flight by commercial air, and if the publicist treated him the way that others got treated, he was in coach. He might have gotten cocktail peanuts or some kind of truly bad sandwich, but little else.

“Yeah, I was in LA. My day started at four A.M. One four-thirty A.M. interview, live on camera, another on tape for the eight A.M. show, and then a radio appearance on the way to LAX.”

She did the math. He must have cut it close. Because to get to New York in time to be on Made Up Controversies Are Us, he had to be on a flight by seven A.M. at the latest.

“I slept on the plane. It didn’t do a lot of good. Some kid kicked my seat for the whole five-plus hours of the flight. Or maybe it just seemed that way.” He sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m not usually a complainer.”

“Maybe you should be,” Nissa said. “This sounds ridiculous. No wonder you’re stretched to the breaking point. When are you done?”

He sighed. “What day is it?”

“December third,” she said.

“Oh, crap. I have another week.” He looked even more tired, if that were possible.

Poor thing. She would have revolted long before this. “Then you get to go home?”

“Then I get to go home just in time for the last week of classes, and exams. I’m sure I’ll get lots of ribbing from the students, lots of debriefing from the faculty.” There was that wistful note again, as if he couldn’t wait. He seemed to love teaching.

She tried to find an upside for him. “At least your book hit the Times list.”

He gave her a wry smile. “And how many people will read the entire book when they realize it’s not about Santa Claus?”

Good point. She shrugged, even though she knew the answer. So did he. The book would languish on coffee tables until the next controversial book hit the airwaves.

“You’ll make some money,” she said. She wasn’t quite sure why she was trying to make him feel better about all of this. Maybe because he looked so tired, so defeated.

“I’m not in this for the money.” He grabbed the beer nuts and shifted the container from hand to hand. “I actually want to educate people. Our food is killing us. Additives and unnecessary ingredients, and corn starch, and overeating—”

“I know,” she said, realizing why the publicist had focused on Santa Claus. Ryan really was on a mission; just not the one the Old Boys thought he was on. “I read the news.”

“Which means you don’t know,” Ryan said. “Do you know anyone who’s overweight? Got chronic health problems like diabetes? Or gout? Did you know those used to be rich people diseases? And they’re infecting kids now? This is a crisis—”

“Soapbox alert,” she said, holding up her hands. “I agreed with you, remember.”

“Sorry.” He let go of the beer nuts. “This is what I’ve been wanting to talk about, and whenever I do, everyone runs from the topic. They don’t want to hear about it. I get it. I do. But I’ve been wanting to have a substantive discussion with someone for four weeks now.”

“I’m your designated someone?” she asked with a smile.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you are. Do you mind?”

She did, a little. She wasn’t sure why she had asked him here, except that she had found him attractive and smart and sexy. And now he was revealing himself as a professor of public health. The kind you didn’t want to go on a tear.

“Are you sure you want to have this conversation with me?” she said. “I work for a company called Claus & Company. I like Santa, as much as I agree with you about modernizing him.”

“I don’t dislike him,” Ryan said, looking like a man who wanted to bang his head on the table. “I—”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s just I’m not the person you should be talking to.”

Or maybe she was. Because his speech hurt a little, which was why she tuned him out. Her mother had loved her baked goods, her cookies, her candies, and just plain eating. And her mother hated exercise in all forms, not that exercise was easy at the North Pole. You had to like winter sports, from ice-skating to cross-country skiing to snowshoeing. Her mother hated all of that, and lived for her allotted month off in the Hawaiian Islands. Where the eating habits weren’t a lot better than the North Pole, but at least in the Islands, her mother walked everywhere and waded into Pacific and took diving lessons back when Nissa was a girl, a long, long, long time ago.

That was where her mother had met Nissa’s father. Food had been their way to relate. And they both related themselves into larger and larger sizes. Her father had died young from something preventable. No magic there, either.

Ryan was watching her. It was almost as if he could see those thoughts run across her face.

Maybe he could. She had fought her own weight for years now, probably making a different sort of bad choice, not eating enough instead of eating too much.

“I’m sorry,” Ryan said. “You’ve been really nice to me, and I’ve been sticking my foot in my mouth all afternoon. Let’s stop talking about me. I really do want to know about you. You’re the first real person I’ve talked to in weeks.”

She wasn’t that kind of real. She wondered what he’d think if he discovered she was from the North Pole. That North Pole.

“Please,” he was saying. “Tell me what you do for Claus & Company?”

She would love to. She would love to tell him everything, including how magic failed at the most important levels. She would tell him about the importance of happiness—how she was in the happiness business—but maybe that business needed some tweaking.

She would talk to him, professional to professional, and maybe, maybe woman to the man she was attracted to, and—

None of that was going to happen. She couldn’t let it happen. She’d only known him a few hours.

“We manage Christmas brands,” she said, telling what little part of the truth she could. “Including Santa. So I am intrigued by all of this.”

His smile looked pasted on, rather like it had on the show an hour before. He knew she was skating over everything. He probably thought she didn’t like him.

And she did. She really did.

“How do you get a job like that?” he asked.

She let out a small laugh. No one had asked her that before. “It’s a family business. I showed an aptitude for Greater—um, for the media, and branding, and ended up in New York. I love it here.”

“The company has offices outside of New York?” He frowned at her.

“You’d be surprised at how big this company is,” she said.

“I’m not sure I would, given what I’ve been through lately,” he said.

The waitress came by and dropped the salad in front of him. The lettuce bounced twice before it settled. He thanked her, but she had already left before he got the words out.

“It sounds like you need a break from all things Santa,” Nissa said.

“If you’re all things Santa, then no, I don’t need a break,” he said. “You’re the nicest person I’ve meet in weeks.”

She smiled. Maybe he wasn’t attracted to her, but at least he found her likeable. That was a start, anyway.

Not that she knew what it was a start of. If anything. He was a professor, after all, and she had a weird job.

And a very weird life.

“Still,” she said. “Let’s talk about something else. How about them Mets?”

He laughed, just like he was supposed to, proving that he truly was a New Yorker at heart. She wished she could have a real conversation with him.

She usually didn’t wish that about anyone. She liked keeping the family secrets. But not today. Today she wanted to give him just a little bit of magic, something else to believe in.

And giving away that kind of information was something she could never ever do.

8

THEY ACTUALLY TALKED baseball in the middle of the Christmas shopping season. They couldn’t talk football because he was too addled and stressed and time-challenged to keep track of the games like he usually did (and he refrained from telling Nissa that he was concerned—as a doctor and a professor of public health—about enjoying a sport which damaged its players horribly for life).

Nissa got some kind of grilled chicken sandwich and ate it slowly. He had finished his burger so fast that he must have sent some sort of land-speed record. The burger had been delicious, even though it was charred an inch past its natural life, and he now knew why Nissa frequented this place.

He was trying hard not to be a spoilsport, trying not to be that pedantic guy you invited to your house only to realize he could talk about three things well, and on everything else he was a judgmental idiot.

The problem was that Ryan felt like a judgmental idiot whenever he was tired, and he had gone beyond tired around Thanksgiving. Which seemed like years ago. Thanksgiving had been his last day off. He had been “given” that day to spend with his family, although Wendy had called in the middle of dinner to ask if he would do a live remote from his brother’s library for some newscast.

Ryan had somehow missed Wendy’s call. He got the rather irate voicemail five minutes after he hit “ignore,” and decided then and there that “ignore” was his very best friend.

Thinking of which, he groped for his phone. Wendy should have been trying to call him. He should have been pressing “ignore” every fifteen seconds.

“Everything all right?” Nissa asked.

“I think I left my phone at the studio,” he said, and then he laughed. “No wonder Wendy can’t find me. She probably put tracking software on the damn thing.”

“She’s dedicated to her job,” Nissa said.

“I’m told she’s the best,” Ryan said.

“You don’t believe it?” Nissa asked.

“I don’t know this world, and I don’t really want to.”

“That was polite.”

He shrugged. “I’m not cut out for this.”

“Actually,” Nissa said softly, “you are. You’re handsome and personable and you make even the most difficult subjects understandable—”

“That part comes from being a professor,” he said, feeling a bit uncomfortable at her description.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’ve known a lot of professors. The good ones make things clear and fascinating. The bad ones make you never want to discuss a topic again.”

He chuckled, remembering an econ professor he’d had who was so stunningly bad that the dense and dry textbooks seemed twice as entertaining.

“Okay,” he said. “Point taken.”

“Really,” she said. “You’ve got more charisma on camera than anyone I’ve seen inside the business let alone outside of it. Your voice is very persuasive. Do you have ma—?”

She stopped herself, as if she were about to say something untoward. He wondered what that would be.

“Is that why you defended me? Because I’m persuasive?” he asked, thinking maybe he would make that into a joke, but by the time he’d finished the thought he knew it wasn’t.

“No,” she said firmly. Then frowned. “Maybe. Actually, I think we agree on some of this, and I do want to take it to my people.”

“They can change Santa’s image?”

She looked at him sideways, and for the first time since the elevator, he noted her slightly pointed ears. He was tired. Was he thinking she was some kind of elf?

A woman who had pointed ears who worked for Santa. He knew he wasn’t hallucinating her because his stomach was full and he was in a pub that he could never have found on his own. He had had no alcohol, so he wasn’t wearing beer goggles.

She was real. He was tired. He imagined things when he was tired. He just had to leave it at that.

“We can try to change Santa’s image,” she said after a moment. “Not this Christmas, though.”

“By next Christmas, I’ll be yesterday’s news,” he said. He hoped he would be. Because he couldn’t do this one more time. He just couldn’t.

“I know. But Santa’s image isn’t a one-season thing.” She spoke softly, as if she were talking to herself. Then her gaze met his. He felt like she had touched him. There was something alive in her gaze, something he liked, something—

Oh, jeez, he was tired.

“I would like to see you again,” she said, and he couldn’t tell if she was speaking as a woman or as the public relations person for Claus & Company. Not that it mattered. He didn’t have time to sleep, let alone spend a day with a beautiful woman.

“I’m so booked,” he said, and he hoped it didn’t sound like an excuse. He really wanted to be with her. More than he could say.

“I know you’re booked,” she said. “I didn’t mean now.”

He blinked. A date? She was asking for a date? Or was this professional? And how did he ask that without being really clueless?

“Let me contact you after this tour thing ends,” she said. “Do you have a card?”

He did, now, even though he had been tempted to toss them all. Wendy had drawn them up for him when she realized he didn’t have one.

What professor needs a business card? He had asked.

You, Wendy had snarled.

He fumbled for his wallet. He had a moment of panic as he worried that he’d left his wallet with his phone, but he hadn’t. The wallet was with him; the phone wasn’t. He smiled to himself. Yeah, that wasn’t intentional. Nope, no sir, no way.

He pulled out a card and handed it to Nissa.

“I’m getting dinner too,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I invited you.”

“And I’m not paying for anything on this trip. Let me.”

“Yeah,” the waitress said from behind him. “Let him.”

She snatched the credit card out of his hand and vanished with it. He hadn’t even seen the bill, and he wasn’t sure he cared.

“Here’s my card,” Nissa said, and handed him something done in tasteful green and gold. He never normally would have thought green and gold tasteful, but these colors were muted and the gold seemed to sparkle all on its own.

The card just had her name, Claus & Company, a phone number, and a corporate e-mail.

He turned it over as he put it in his wallet, hoping for a private number on the back, but no such luck. No date then. Just business.

“You think I can help you with rebranding Santa?” he asked.

“I want to read your material and develop a few things,” she said. “Then I need to talk with some important people. Maybe after the first…?”

If I survive to the first, he thought but didn’t say. “I’d like that,” he said. “I’d like that very much.”

9

NISSA WALKED HIM back to the plaza, figuring he could find his way inside again. She thought she might take him upstairs to search for that lost phone, but that felt just a bit off.

He looked so tired. He needed sleep more than he needed—what had he called it?—a real conversation. She wished she had the kind of magic that would give him just a little energy boost. But her magic was subtler than that. It made people trust her. She could design beautiful imagery and convince people to spend money where they normally wouldn’t.

In the off season, in fact, she designed brochures for some of Santa’s favorite charities, as well as websites and giving campaigns. Just a touch of magic to convince someone to click the “donate five dollars” button or text the right combination of letters to the designated number. Her campaigns always brought in more money because of that hint of magic.

Not enough to convince people to spend money they wouldn’t normally spend, but just enough to relax them, to make them think they were a tiny bit better off than other people. Enough to make them confident in their own ability to change someone’s life for the better.

She probably could have given Ryan that kind of boost, but she hadn’t thought of it until she watched him stagger inside the building. And even then, the idea felt just a little wrong. She didn’t want to magick him in any way. She wanted him free of any influence, even the slightest influence.

Then she sighed, her breath frosting in the chill night air. She could hear the music from the skating rink, the laughter of lovers and tourists who were having their ideal Christmas.

She liked this guy way too much.

Now she would have to go home and tell everyone in the North Pole why she hadn’t reined him in. Why she had offered to meet with him in January.

Why she wanted to meet with him in January.

And she couldn’t even tell the truth about it, because she wasn’t entirely sure of the truth. Yeah, he had good ideas. But he had even better eyes. She could lose herself in them.

Or maybe, she already had.

10

THE MEAL OUT had been worth the look Wendy, darling Wendy, Wendy darling had given him. Hell, the meal out had been worth the entire trip, with all of its hassles. And that was saying something.

It had even relaxed him about Wendy darling.

She had been marching around the third floor, searching for him, clutching his phone in one hand as if squeezing it would conjure him up.

Then, when Ryan appeared, she had squinted and yelled at him for leaving without her, for blowing the schedule, for being impossible to find.

Network employees watched. He had a hunch the encounter was being filmed. It might even end up on YouTube—or it would have if he had said what he was thinking.

Instead, he said meekly, I need to eat sometime, Wendy. I just went for a meal.

I have a meal scheduled for you after you get to your hotel, she snapped.

Good, he said. I’ll probably be hungry all over again. You know, you really need to set up these tours with human beings in mind. We need food and sleep to function at even half capacity.

And then he had walked off, taking the elevator down to the parking garage where he had gambled that the limo was waiting for him.

He had been right. Same driver, same limo. And when Ryan asked if he could leave without Wendy, the driver smiled and said, Why not? as if it had been his idea.

It took less than ten minutes to get to the hotel, less than twenty to have a shower and turn down the sheets on the bed. Less than thirty to realize Ryan wasn’t going to sleep no matter how tired he was.

Visions of Nissa were dancing in his head.

The woman had charmed him. He liked her more than he had liked a woman in years. Not since Claire in college. He’d lived with Claire for a few years, before they realized that they didn’t belong together. Claire had been a wonderful person, and now she was one of the best pediatricians in the five boroughs, but they’d never had that spark.

Ryan got out his wallet and slipped the card from it. He was so tired that the words seemed to dance, the gold seemed to spark. He could see little flakes of magic float around his fingertips, as if the card gave off the essence of Nissa.

He smiled at it, then closed his fist around it, and leaned back.

This time, he fell asleep—and his dreams, well, his dreams were the best dreams he’d had in weeks. Maybe years. Maybe in his entire life.

They almost made the four A.M. wake-up call worthwhile, even when he realized he wouldn’t have time for room service breakfast. Even when he heard that Wendy, darling Wendy, Wendy darling had squeezed in another interview right over lunch.

He wished he could see Nissa again, and he was sorry—oh so sorry—that he had to wait until January.

Because at this rate, he was beginning to wonder if January would ever come.

11

CHRISTMAS PASSED IN a blur, just like it always did. No one at the North Pole got to celebrate in December. For a while, they tried to celebrate in January, but realized they were all too sick of the season to even pretend they wanted gifts or candy or Christmas trees. Christmas for the folks at Claus & Company took place in late May/early June, almost as incentive to get back into the festive spirit.

Usually Nissa loved those celebrations. But this year, she worried about them, since her mother was still not well.

Like everyone else at the North Pole, though, her mother had done what she could to get through Christmas. And Nissa took care of her and filled in where she was needed, which was usually Last Minute Toy Creation, something she wasn’t half bad at—something to do with imagery and good feelings and all those little things her magic could manage.

She hadn’t minded the whirlwind end to the season because it prevented her from thinking about anything except toys and snow and holidays. Even her mother’s mood had lifted.

Nissa hadn’t had much of a chance to think about Ryan, either, nor had she used any of the Pole’s spying capabilities to keep track of him. That had taken a lot more restraint than she had expected; after all, she had only met him the once.

But she felt connected to him. She also felt a bit stalker-y. Before she had come home to do her stint in the toy mines, she had downloaded all of his interviews. She watched them one by one, sometimes over meals, sometimes before bed. (Too often before bed.)

If someone had asked her what she was doing, she would have said that she was doing her research for her debrief after the holidays. But no one asked. She wasn’t even sure anyone noticed, although once her mother had found her, sprawled on the couch staring at her tablet, and asked, Who is that nice-looking young man?

Nissa wouldn’t have called him nice-looking, which she saw as a step down from good-looking, nor would she have called him young. She would have called him perfect. But she didn’t tell her mother that. Instead, she had said, in the most noncommittal voice she could manage, He’s a professor of public health at some university.

Too bad, her mother had said. I thought maybe he was someone interesting.

Oh, how Nissa wanted to correct her mother. Oh, how she wanted to talk to her mother. But Nissa had no idea what would happen with Ryan down the road, and she didn’t want to get her mother’s hopes up. Her mother had wanted Nissa to get involved with someone for years now, and so far, that hadn’t happened.

Not since her second year in New York. Year One had been all about dating a bunch of good-looking (nice-looking?) but somewhat creepy men. Year Two had been about Adam, who had been fascinating at first, mostly because he wasn’t creepy, was totally brilliant, and didn’t believe in any of that “fantasy crap,” as he called anything to do with magic.

Ultimately, though, his dismissive attitude—which was probably what had attracted her—repelled her. His brilliant mind remained closed to most everything he didn’t understand. If he couldn’t prove it, it didn’t exist. And after a while, that had grown truly wearing.

Not that her mother had met him either. As far as Nissa’s mother was concerned, Nissa had never had a serious relationship and really needed to lay off work for a while.

Nissa always felt like she needed to lay off work after the holidays. She felt that way now, as she approached the debrief.

Because she knew it would be ugly.

For one week after she had seen Ryan, he had continued to talk about Santa and Santa’s bad habits. No one from Image Headquarters had called her, which seemed even more ominous than a what-the-hell? phone call.

By New Year’s, she wondered if she would be relegated to the land of last-minute toys forever.

And now, she would find out. January 2. D-Day. The day that would live in infamy.

The day that could, she feared, change her life forever.

12

SCHOOL DIDN’T START for one more week, but Ryan was in his office already. He had retreated here after returning from the Trip From Hell, which was the only way he referred to the book tour now.

Yes, he had made some extra money, and he had gotten in the virtual Rolodexes (if people even called it that anymore) of more than twenty major talk show producers. Some had already called him for “public health’s take” on gluten-free foods or the latest flu epidemic.

He’d begged off, in one case pleading flu himself, even though he was remarkably healthy, considering what a pounding his body had taken in the height of cold-and-flu season.

At the end of the final week, Wendy’d had to leave the tour because she had contracted flu, and he’d actually sent her flowers, along with a large delivery of the best chicken soup in New York City. He tried not to see the delivery of the soup as a kind of middle-finger toward her; he wanted to feel compassion, but he really didn’t. Wendy had made his life miserable for six weeks, and while he knew she was only doing her job, he still felt rather angry about it.

And gun-shy. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. End of the semester classes, which he had been looking forward to, felt like running some kind of gauntlet, and Christmas shopping, with its tinny Muzak and cheerful salesclerks, gave him talk-show flashbacks.

At least the family Christmas dinner had been nice. Until his nephew showed a composite of all of Ryan’s interviews, proving his suspicion correct. Ryan had restated his position—if, indeed, anyone could have a real position on Santa Claus—so many times that he actually had used the same phrases over and over again. It looked like one of those joke videos, and to his family it was.

To Ryan, it was just another aspect of his nightmare.

The only thing that had gotten him through the nightmare had been that lunch/dinner/meal with Nissa Kealoha. He fell asleep those last seven nights with her business card clutched in his hand. The card should have fallen apart, but whenever he looked at it—and he still looked at it daily—it seemed brand new. Sometimes he thought maybe it replenished itself in his wallet.

But he knew that wasn’t possible. She had just had it made out of the sturdiest paper known to mankind. Or something. If he were a business card kinda guy, he would have asked her where she got the cards printed. But he hoped he would never need a business card again.

He was holding that card now. He was sitting at his desk, piled with paperwork that had stacked up while he was away, and he was turning a little green-and-gold business card over and over in his hand. Then he would look at the solid black phone that had been on this desk since the Reagan Administration, and he would wonder if he should pick up the receiver and dial Nissa’s number.

He wanted to use the ancient landline, connected to the university’s system, because—for some reason he couldn’t quite name—he was embarrassed to use his own cell phone. Maybe because he knew that Nissa wanted to keep their relationship professional, and to him, the relationship wasn’t professional at all.

He’d even watched their interview. His responses were cringe-worthy (although he always found his interviews cringe-worthy) but her defense of him was spirited. She had looked surprised at herself, as if he had convinced her of the importance of his argument, even though he couldn’t seem to convince anyone else about it.

He set the card back in his wallet and tried to concentrate. That little blip in his life was over.

Ryan got up and walked to the mullioned window that overlooked one of the most beautiful sections of campus. Evergreen trees, ancient buildings, lots of walking paths—all covered with snow right now, since it was deepest, darkest winter in Upstate New York. But he loved it. He loved the time of year; he loved the quiet.

Or he usually did. Right now, he was restless. He hadn’t been able to concentrate since he returned.

And he blamed that business card.

He wanted to call Nissa, but he wasn’t exactly sure how to approach her. If he should approach her at all.

13

SHE SHOULD HAVE brought a gas mask. Nissa had forgotten about the cigarette smoke, and she shouldn’t have. It hit her every time. But this winter had been particularly cold and snowy at the North Pole, and the internal heating system at Image Headquarters was very 1950s. It had probably clogged up due to all the tobacco being consumed, and no one had had time in the last few months to do any maintenance.

The pipe and cigar smokers huddled in the back of the conference room, as if they knew they could pollute more air from that location. The cigarette smokers actually tapped their unlit cigarettes on the table, thinking, talking, waiting to light up maybe? They couldn’t be grossed out by the cigar smokers, could they?

Everyone around the table was male, again. The older Image Specialists, the men who created the media Santa, were the only ones here. The women who had been working on the tech last time Nissa had come to this conference room were gone.

They were Image Specialists too, but not senior ones. And Nissa had had their jobs before escaping to the Greater World. They were called “hon,” and “sweetie,” and were asked to bring coffee, which they did. Nissa had actually talked with personnel more than once, complaining about the atmosphere in Image Headquarters—anonymously, of course—and had been told that Image Headquarters would remain an Old Boys Club until the Old Boys decided to retire.

She had no idea how long that would be, because everyone’s lives here were magically lengthened. Even the non-magical humans who came to work here as adults managed to get an extra hundred or so years out of it. Those who had some magic sometimes had two hundred or more years.

And these guys—well, most of them were part elf (some would say part S-Elf, but she didn’t really want to look at the genealogies to check)—and she was truly unclear as to how long they lived. Her mother’s grandparents still lived, but wouldn’t say how old they were. Elves didn’t talk about personal things, like longevity or family matters, which was why it took so long for the Image Specialists to come up with an image for Mrs. Claus. She wanted to remain anonymous—and technically she was, since her name was not (in the North Pole, anyway) Mrs. Claus.

In fact, she looked nothing like the rotund, cheerful woman of the Image Specialist’s imagination. Nissa always thought of her more as Cruella de Vil—with a mean streak.

But of course Nissa didn’t say that. She didn’t say much when she was at the Pole. It was safer not to.

And now, she had the meeting she’d been dreading for weeks. In which she would probably have to speak. And, she worried, if she said something wrong, she could lose her job and her beloved New York apartment.

She had worn black pants and a loose red tunic to this meeting, clothes that were easily washed. She actually had started a closet in her mother’s house for clothes to wear to Image Headquarters so that she wouldn’t have to destroy her other clothing.

There were no rules to make the Pole more health-conscious, and she had hated that from the beginning. She hated it more now, after indoctrinating herself by watching Ryan’s videos.

Maybe he did have a point.

“Ah, Miss Kealoha,” said Ludwig, standing and stubbing out his cigar at the same time. “So good of you to join us.”

She looked around for Oskar. He leaned against the table in the back, arms crossed. She’d seen that before. He was mad at her, and so he was going to let someone else do the talking.

That the someone else was Ludwig was a bad sign.

“Close the door, please,” said Casper, the kindest of the Old Boys. His beard had yellowed from the tobacco he’d smoked over the years, and he actually had a few cigarette burns in it. He’d been such a presence in New York in the 1930s that he had become the inspiration for Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo, who created Casper the Friendly Ghost. Casper’s method of working had always been to pop in, cause some trouble, and pop out, and they recorded that in their original comic.

Nissa leaned out the door, took a deep breath of somewhat-fresh air, and then pulled the door closed, trapping her inside the room with these men—her superiors. Who did not look happy.

She remained standing since they hadn’t invited her to sit, both hands on the back of the only available chair.

“Nissa, sweetie,” said Sven, one of the Old Boys she never liked to sit near. He had roving hands, although at the moment, they clung to a rather odd-shaped pipe. He was trying to ignite the damn thing—or light it, or whatever anyone called it. He was puffing it, sending out blue smoke to mix with the crud already in the air. “Didn’t we tell you to shut down this Professor Palmer?”

She knew it. She knew the Old Boys hadn’t liked what happened. She’d played this meeting over and over in her mind. Usually it ended with her being fired. Sometimes, with her in tears. Sometimes with her pounding on the blond wood table and screaming at the Old Boys, telling them what she really thought.

“You did,” she said. She felt like she was in a court of law.

“But you didn’t do that, did you?” Sven said.

“My understanding,” she said slowly, “was that you wanted me to handle him, the way I had handled the previous crisis. In that case, I got reporters to cover the story—”

“And in this case, you agreed with that horrible young man,” Ludwig said, his eyes glinting green. Ah, so that was why Oskar wasn’t saying anything. They had found her performance awful.

Well, she supposed from their perspective, it was.

She sighed, then wished she hadn’t. She had to swallow twice to prevent herself from coughing. “May I tell you what happened from my perspective? Because so much happened behind the scenes.”

She sounded formal and proper, the kind of subservient employee they probably wanted to hear from. Or maybe not. Image Specialists were the most unpredictable people in the corporate part of Claus & Company.

They were all staring at her. The pipe smokers had stopped puffing. The cigar smokers had taken their stogies down and were holding them in their hands. The cigarette smokers had never lit up in the first place.

“I’m not sure what you could say,” Casper said, his tone kind. “Because we all saw that interview, the one you gave the moment after you returned—”

“Right after we told you to shut him down,” Ludwig said.

Her heart was pounding. “You don’t know what I could say because you don’t know what happened,” she said. “So give me my chance to speak up or fire me now.”

She hadn’t expected to say that last. She wasn’t even sure when the last time someone got fired from the North Pole was. She knew the firing had happened in corporate, but decades ago. Or maybe even a century ago. Before they learned the art of transferring the bad employee to another department, another sector.

Oskar’s eyes narrowed. Smoke swirled around him like an aura. He no longer looked like the kindly grandfather type who had spent all his time nurturing her. Now he looked a little like Bad Santa from a thousand bad movies.

No one spoke. No one defended her, and no one mentioned that firing was not an option. That was a bit unnerving.

Since no one spoke, she decided to.

“I spoke with Ryan Palmer,” she said, deliberately leaving out the fact that the conversation had happened after the interview, not before. “He hates the celebrity. He was roped into all that press. He’s not going to be around next Christmas. He just wants to teach.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ludwig said. “He started a conversation. It’s continuing. It continued all the way up to the holiday. Some of our staff reported that children at malls were asking Santa to lose weight.”

Nissa frowned, not expecting that. She had no idea how the media had handled the Santa story after Palmer left the picture. She’d been working in Last Minute Toys by then.

“You’re seeing the children’s questions as a bad thing?” she asked, and then knew her response was the wrong one.

Oskar had bent his head down, so that his eyes seemed like slits. He was glaring at her so hard she could feel it from across the room. Maybe he was even using his image magic on her, only in a negative way.

She didn’t try to block. She wasn’t sure what he was doing, so she couldn’t accurately counteract it. So she decided to ignore him, and speak to the others. They had to understand. Because she might be sacrificing her entire career over this.

“Professor Palmer started a dialogue we should be having about revamping Santa’s image for the 21st century,” she said, her stomach twisting. “After all, you changed his appearance from the 19th to the 20th. The Santa of the post-Civil War newspapers isn’t the jolly-faced man of the Coca-Cola ads between the wars.”

“Times were bleaker after the war.” Sven muttered.

“After which war?” she asked, deciding to stop playing the naïve, subservient employee. “Because times were bleak in the 1930s. Very bleak, in fact, and that’s when America’s love affair with Santa grew to epic proportions—not in the least because of you, Oskar, and the way you moved with the times.”

“You’re not going to smooth this over with flattery, missy,” Ludwig said, and it looked like he said it before Oskar could get the words out.

Flattery? She hadn’t meant that as flattery. She was forming an argument, and they weren’t listening.

“I’m not saying this for flattery’s sake,” she said. “I’m mentioning it because it’s been almost a century since we’ve revamped—”

“We loosened everything in the 1960s,” Sven said, tamping on his pipe. “Everything. We let others use the brand. We let them make disrespectful films about Santa. Those postcards—”

“Were very creative,” she said, trying to get the discussion back on track. She wasn’t sure which postcards he was referring to, and she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to go into the details. She needed to talk about the overall situation. “But that loosening was more than fifty years ago. Everything we’ve seen since then was because of the loosening in the 1960s. Nothing new has happened on the Santa Image front since then, and personally, I think that’s too long. Change isn’t always bad—”

“We know, missy,” Ludwig said. “We’re the ones who brought change to the Pole in the first place. We’re the ones who took our brand out of myth and legend, which varied from country to country, mind you, and decided to homogenize it. We’re the ones who saw worldwide potential in a unified message. We’re the ones who opened the gates to all of those jobs that exist all over the world because we’re the ones who put the name ‘Santa Claus’ on every lip. We’re the ones—”

“But we’ve skated,” Nissa said. They were living so far in the past that she wasn’t sure she could bring them out of it. They seemed to hear everything she said as an attack on them and not as suggestions for improving Santa’s image. They seemed to have no idea at all about the way things were now.

She didn’t want them on the defensive. She wanted them to listen to her.

“We’re letting others define our brand,” she said. “We’ve let others define Santa since those beer ads from the 1990s. Frankly, I think that a relaxed Santa, sitting on a beach somewhere drinking a beer and staring at the ocean is the wrong direction for our brand. I’ve always believed that. Why didn’t we protest that when it happened? Why isn’t anyone mentioning it? Not even Professor Palmer said anything about it.”

“Then maybe it’s not important,” Sven said, fiddling with his pipe.

“Maybe it is. Maybe it’s a symptom, and maybe you know it. That’s why Professor Ryan bothers you. Because what he’s saying is true.”

The Old Boys stared at her. She stared back. She was glad they hadn’t told her to sit. She actually towered over them, and could look down on them. For a group that specialized in symbolism, they apparently hadn’t thought the whole posture thing through. If they had invited her to sit down, she would have had a lot less of their attention.

But she wasn’t going to let it go now.

“Why are we so protective of our rum-filled eggnog and Christmas cookies? Are they really that crucial to our brand? Does the Big Guy himself live on eggnog and Christmas cookies? I’ll wager he’s sick of them. He’s about so much more than that.”

Casper leaned back in his chair and stroked his beard. She couldn’t tell, but she had a hunch she had reached him.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” she said, lowering her voice just a little. “Why aren’t we protecting the health of our greatest investment? Why aren’t we happy that children want Santa to live longer? Why are we angry at a professor of public health for pointing out something that we should have noticed years ago? Is it because we should have noticed it?”

“Those children were just parroting your Professor Palmer,” Ludwig said.

“First, he’s not ‘my’ Professor Palmer,” Nissa said, even though she wouldn’t mind if he were. His image flashed across her mind, and she felt her heart rate increase. Then she forced herself to focus. “Second, children don’t ‘parrot’ professors of public health. Children are actually pretty sensible. Isn’t that what you told me when I started at Image Headquarters? That children know what they like and don’t like and know more than we give them credit for?”

Ludwig glared at her. Oskar wasn’t even looking at her. His head was bowed; he was staring at his shoes as if he were embarrassed for her.

“The children,” she continued, “are seeing a problem. They’re seeing the same health problems in their schools, in their families. They know that weight is an issue—the entire culture talks about it, and sometimes bluntly, sometimes saying that people who are heavy won’t live very long. So why wouldn’t children recognize the same in their favorite holiday icon? Why wouldn’t they worry?”

“They’re not supposed to worry about Santa,” Casper said.

“Exactly,” she said. “And they are.”

Her words echoed in that crowded room. Casper still stroked his beard. Sven puffed on his pipe, sending small smoke rings into the thick air. Ludwig still glared, and Oskar—Oskar still hadn’t looked at her.

Finally he raised his head. Then he stood up—slowly, like a man in pain. His gaze hit hers with such force that it almost hurt.

“The children are worrying,” he said, “because you didn’t shut down Palmer like we told you to.”

Did he just say it was her fault? Was Oskar so egotistical, so blind, that he couldn’t take criticism?

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re blaming me?”

“For this entire debacle. For Palmer, for the children, for all of it.”

They were going to fire her or at least transfer her laterally to some hellhole, like Last Minute Toys. So she might as well speak her mind.

“Really,” she said, her voice even softer. But she knew they could hear her in this room. They could probably hear her heartbeat in this room. “So you get rid of me or move me laterally and then what will you do when the next professor of public health or some TV doctor or someone with a vast audience starts complaining about Santa as a role model? Because this is the second time I’ve dealt with it. Sure, Professor Palmer blitzed the US media, but the last guy wasn’t American at all. He was Australian, he wrote for a British medical journal, and he got a lot of airplay in the US as well. If those two men, from different parts of the world, come up with this independently of each other, then other people will come to the same conclusion. It won’t change. It’s happening, and you can’t stop it.”

“Maybe not now,” Oskar said. “You could have stopped it by taking him on one month ago.”

She let out a small shocked laugh. “No, I couldn’t. You can try to make this my fault, but it has nothing to do with me, and it has everything to do with you.”

“Me?” Oskar said, his cheeks fire-engine red—and not in a good way.

“All of you,” she said. “You all moved here at the same time, and for some reason, you thought you could handle Image Analysis in the Greater World while divorcing yourself from the Greater World. You’re failing Imagery 101. You know you have to stay in touch with current trends to understand how the masses think—to manipulate how the masses think. Instead, you can’t even handle a television signal, let alone online chatter. In fact, I’ll wager you don’t even know what online chatter is. Or how important it is. Or how to access it.”

“Now, see here, Missy,” Ludwig said.

“Oh, and that?” she said, whirling toward him, pointing a finger in his direction. “That tone, that word ‘missy’? It would get you fired in the Greater World, or reprimanded, or at the very least, removed from anything to do with employees. You can’t talk to junior executives like that anymore, particularly female execs.”

“See?” Sven said in a stage whisper to the Old Boy next to him. “I told you this was a feminist thing. They want to overthrow the S-Elf system and install a woman, based on gender. That’s what all of this is about. Forget tradition, forget the way things are, forget all our years of imagery tweaking—”

“And that,” Nissa said, putting her hands on the table and bending toward Sven. “That fear of feminists. That’s so very 1970s.”

They all leaned away from her as if she had thrown something at them. She wondered what that was about. She wished she knew more about internal Pole politics. Because all those rumors about a female S-Elf taking over Santa’s role just got a bit more credible.

It also explained some of the animosity coming toward her now.

She was going to take an even bigger risk. She was going to dive straight into something political that she might or might not understand.

“What I’m telling you is a problem. It’s not a feminist thing. It’s an out-of-date thing. You’re so far behind in everything cultural because none of you have been to the greater World in decades. Your junior executives flee to the Greater World and we do our best to work within your dictates. But we can’t manipulate. We can only maneuver. And it doesn’t work.”

“You have no right to speak to us that way, Missy.” It was clear, from the emphasis Ludwig put on the word “Missy” that he was now trying to piss her off.

“I have every right,” Nissa said. “Because you’re not listening to people on the ground, and you’re right: Santa’s image has become a crisis. But it’s a crisis that you, not that Professor Palmer, made. You’re too out of touch to know anything about branding and imaging in this new century, and you’re too blind to realize it.”

Oskar slammed a fist on the chair beside him. It leapt in astonishment—and she couldn’t tell if the leap was because the chair just naturally bounced or if its own internal magic system was startled.

“We were talking about your misbehavior over Palmer,” Oskar said, making it sound like she slept with Palmer on national television. If only she had slept with him (although not on national television). Then she might deserve this treatment. As it stood, Oskar had no right to be this angry with her.

“Really?” she said. “We’re talking about Palmer? Because I thought we were talking about Santa’s image. Isn’t that what this is about? Isn’t that what we should be focused on here in Image Analysis?”

Oskar’s face had turned purple. He opened his mouth to say something else when Casper raised his head.

“It is what we should focus on,” he said in his calm tone. “And frankly, we haven’t been. We’ve let our most important brand slide. And worse, we’ve let other people control it.”

Nissa felt her breath catch. He was agreeing with her?

“Brava, Miss Kealoha. You have somehow gotten it through our—or maybe just my—thick skull that we have not paid the right kind of attention.”

“Casper,” Oskar said. “You don’t understand.”

“No,” Casper said, and for the first time, Nissa saw the strong man behind the “ghost.” “You don’t understand. Miss Kealoha is right. Palmer is not our problem. We have a much greater one. Palmer is just a symptom.”

“Of what?” Ludwig snapped.

“Of our lack of control,” Casper said. “Eighty years ago, we would have known about his book. We would have seen the threat, maybe before it was published, certainly before his—what is it called? Press tour?—started, and long before he ever showed up on television.”

Sven set down his pipe. “We tried to get Miss Kealoha to do her job.”

“She was,” Casper said, “and you don’t appreciate it. She’s right. We’re wrong. And personally, I think she’s the one to fix it.”

Nissa frowned. She wasn’t quite sure what he meant.

“Fix what?” she asked tentatively.

“Everything,” Casper said.

14

RYAN STOOD IN front of the gigantic white board in his favorite classroom. For some reason, his laptop wasn’t talking to the projector, and so nothing displayed on the whiteboard at all. All last week, he had compiled a PowerPoint presentation of various public health issues for his 300-level class, Principles of Health Education and Health Promotion.

He had actually looked at his syllabus last week with Nissa in mind, and realized the entire course sounded dull. It wouldn’t play on TV and the undergraduates, social media and game junkies all, would consider the coursework too slow.

He thought of developing a health game, like Farmville, but realized he didn’t have the time or the know-how. Later, he might talk with the urban planning department. He’d heard that they had successfully used some social media games to show the importance of designing a city correctly. Maybe he could do something similar with the environmental impact on health.

But, he realized, he couldn’t do that this semester. All he could do was jazz up the existing material, and that was woefully hard to do. He was well known as one of the best lecturers in the medical school (which the university had folded public health into), but that meant nothing since the level of lecturing expertise in his department was (to be polite) minimal.

So, he’d developed the presentation, and he was proud of it. It actually moved quickly. The music and the images matched and, he realized as he completed it, with some changes, it could be used in health promotion.

One of the wags in his department thought he should add some stuff from his talk show blitz, but even if he could get permissions, he didn’t want to. He never wanted to look at himself doing that publicity tour ever again.

Although he wouldn’t mind looking at Nissa again. He no longer carried her card with him—he’d weaned himself from it—but he still thought of her way too much.

He hunched over the projector. His first class started in two hours, and if he didn’t get the laptop and the projector to talk to each other, he would have to default to the old method of teaching—passing out badly photocopied pieces of paper, and then lecturing about it all. He didn’t want to do that.

He had done a lot of soul-searching over the past month. He finally realized that what he wanted to do was what he had thought the book and the book tour would do: teach people how important individual health was to public health. In the last week or so, he’d come to the conclusion that he was better off influencing one student at a time, and giving that student the tools—and the passion!—to proselytize for him. Which meant that he had to step up his game.

Which he wanted to do, if only the damn PowerPoint presentation worked.

He checked the connections, wondered if there was some way to do this all with wireless, and then realized he’d have to rely on the university’s wireless network which, in this old concrete bunker, built in the 1970s, barely worked at all.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, and looked at the whiteboard as if it provided answers. He was going to have to call the university’s IT department, and that would tank his entire presentation. IT seemed so proud of the fact that they were busy. He always wondered why a university’s IT department would be understaffed. Weren’t there a million student experts who would work for some kind of credit?

“Problems?” a sexy female voice said behind him. The voice sent shivers through him. It sounded like Nissa, but he had Nissa on the brain so much that he thought half his female students sounded like her. He often found himself peering around corners, thinking he had just gotten a glimpse of her when, indeed, he hadn’t seen her at all.

“Computers never work right around me,” he said as he continued to fiddle with the laptop. “It’s really annoying. Of course, I blame the computers, when in reality, I’m the clueless one. I follow the instructions and still miss somehow…”

He turned around as he said that last, and trailed off when he realized he was looking at Nissa. Or some mental phantom of Nissa. Although he doubted that his imagination was capable of imagining her here, looking like that.

She didn’t look at all like the Manhattanite he had seen a month before. She wore appropriate winter attire, for one thing. A heavy, white, parka-like coat over jeans tucked into fur-lined boots that had no heels. She held a pink stocking cap in one hand and mittens in the other. A matching scarf still looped around her neck, making it appear as though her face rested on pinkish snow.

She was even more beautiful than he remembered. Her black hair, mussed a bit on top from the stocking cap, still had a wedge cut, and he couldn’t see those pointed ears (if, indeed, he remembered them correctly and hadn’t made them up in his fevered [and exhausted] imagination). Her dark eyes twinkled at him. The cold had put so much red in her cheeks that it took him a moment to realize she was barely wearing makeup at all.

“Nissa?” he asked stupidly.

She bowed just a little, and waved her arm in a butlerian flourish. “I’d say ‘at your service,’ but that implies the wrong things.”

And made him imagine the wrong things. He felt the whisper of arousal, but willed it away. He didn’t want to think of her that way. (Well, he did, but not right now: not when he had to focus.)

He walked toward her through the maze of metal desk chairs. “I’m…” honored to see you? Surprised you’re here? Jeez, he didn’t even know the right way to talk to her. “I’m…It’s…” great to see you? Fantastic to realize I hadn’t imagined you? “I’m…”

He tripped on one of the chairs, and had to catch himself on the back of the next chair. He was actually happy for the distraction. He was coming off even nerdier than usual.

She grabbed his arm a half second too late, but her grip prevented him from losing his balance. A tingle ran through him. He looked up at her, and when their gazes met, his entire body shivered with pleasure.

“Hi,” he said, settling on brevity.

She smiled. “Hi.”

“I thought Manhattanites never left the nest,” he said, and then wished he hadn’t. Had he insulted her? He hadn’t meant to. He didn’t mean to say anything disparaging about Manhattan, even though the rest of New York hated all the attention it took away from the state.

“Good thing I’m a transplant,” she said.

She was? He didn’t know that. Of course she was. That indefinable accent.

Her face seemed redder than it had a moment earlier. Maybe the cold hadn’t put the roses in her cheeks. Maybe she was embarrassed too. And maybe pigs would fly out of his ass (although he didn’t want that to happen; he’d really be embarrassed then).

She finally released his arm. “I came to see you because I need a consult.”

“A consult?” He repeated what she said because the speech centers in his brain didn’t seem to be working properly. Very little of him (except his hormones) seemed to be working properly. The first time he saw her, he had blamed this reaction on his exhaustion. Now, he was beginning to understand that the problem was just his reaction to her.

“Yeah,” she said, but her gaze had moved away from him and settled on the projector. “But it looks like you have a more pressing problem.”

“I do?” he asked. Come on, brain. Get a grip.

“Do you always have trouble with technology?”

He blinked, once, twice, three times, willing himself to concentrate. “Yes,” he said. “It seems to hate me.”

“Hmmm,” she said, giving him a sideways look that he couldn’t really interpret. It was almost as if she were reassessing him. “Any problems on your tour? Cameras giving out? Mics not working?”

“All the time,” he said, glad to focus on something else for a moment. “I was beginning to think every single studio had crappy equipment. I know it wasn’t me, since I never touched any of it. Usually things go wrong when I touch stuff.”

Okay, that sounded stupid too. Because he really wanted to touch her, and he didn’t want anything to go wrong.

She didn’t seem to notice his discomfort. She didn’t even look at him. Instead, she walked toward the projector. She touched it, and he thought he heard something pop.

He said, “I was just about to call the university’s IT department—”

“Who is probably sick of you, right?” she asked. And then she put a hand to her mouth like a child who had misspoken. “I didn’t mean that like it sounded.”

“Yes, you did,” he said with a smile. Maybe he made her nervous too. Or maybe she was one of those people who picked up on other people’s nervousness and then got nervous on her own. “And you’re right. They are sick of me.”

“I can get this to work for you,” she said. She ran a finger over the laptop, then the projector and then she hit the laptop’s space bar. The first image of his PowerPoint presentation showed up on the screen just like it was supposed to.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Magic.”

“Wish I could replicate that,” he said.

“Oh, you probably could,” she said. “But no need right now. This should work from now on.”

He nodded, wondering how she fixed such a big problem with a simple movement. He had probably missed something obvious. That was usually what happened. And then he felt like an idiot.

Which he did not want to feel like right now—at least about the computer. She wasn’t judgmental over it the way that the IT people were. She acted like tech that malfunctioned for no apparent reason was absolutely normal.

He took a deep breath. He was overthinking (and overfeeling) everything. “You said you wanted to consult?”

“I do, but it looks like you have no time.” She traced the top of the laptop as she said that, almost as if it had reminded her that he had a real job.

“I have time,” he said. “My class doesn’t start for another two hours. I’d have to be here, like, in an hour-forty-five, but the point is, that I do have time.”

Now the speech centers were overloading him with words. He forcibly shut his mouth so that no more words would emerge.

She smiled, even though the smile didn’t quite meet her eyes. “Wonderful,” she said—and he wondered why she was no longer as interested as she had seemed just a few moments ago. Had she just remembered what a nerd he could be? Did seeing him in his native environment make him less interesting? (He had no idea how he could be less interesting. He’d pretty much hit the rock bottom of interesting the last time she saw him, when he’d been tired enough to fall over in the middle of their conversation.)

“My office is two buildings over,” he said, “but there’s a small coffee nook upstairs if you don’t want to go out in the snow.”

“Is it private?” she asked.

The snow? His speech center urged him to ask, but he managed to control that wayward remark. She meant the coffee nook, and he knew that, and a tiny little joke about an unclear antecedent was even nerdier than he wanted to be. He had to tame that weird little voice in his brain somehow, because it was really in overdrive.

“Yeah,” he said, “unless there are students in it. Which we won’t know until we get there.”

“Let’s go to your office then,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”

If he didn’t mind. He’d been fantasizing about inviting her to his office for weeks now. Only in the fantasies, he’d closed the door, then taken her in his arms, kissed her, and—

Well, none of that would happen here. He knew it. He would just have to convince his overactive imagination of it.

“I don’t mind,” he said. “I really don’t mind at all.”

15

SHE SHOULDN’T HAVE come. She realized that when she fixed the projector for him and then told the truth about the way she had done it. Magic. What the hell had she been thinking? If he had believed her—and of course he hadn’t—then she was revealing secrets (again), and if he hadn’t believed her—and of course, he hadn’t—then she had just sounded flip, which she had not been. She didn’t want to seem flip to him, or crazy, or needy, or anything.

If she could have done so in some kind of creative way, she would have fled right then and there, but she couldn’t. Instead, she smiled at him, watched as he grabbed his coat from a nearby chair, and then followed him out of the building.

He moved like a runner, with a natural grace that she hadn’t expected. He also walked like a man on a mission: she had to hurry to keep up with him.

Instead of focusing on him, she pulled on her mittens, but she slipped her cap into her pocket. She should have worn those ear-warmer things, instead of a cap. Her hair probably looked a mess.

As if that mattered. She wasn’t here to seduce him; she was here to talk to him.

Two buildings over sounded far away, but in the vagaries of campus design, it took less time to cross the quad than it did to get out of the building holding his class. He opened a nearly invisible door in the side of a red brick building that looked ancient, and then led her up a flight of well-worn stairs. This building still smelled faintly of chalk and cigarettes, even though she knew that neither had been inside this place for years.

The smell had burrowed into the building’s DNA. It had to be one of the oldest buildings on this very old campus.

He pushed open another door, rounded a corner, and waved at a woman sitting at a desk.

“Professor Palmer,” the woman started, and then she saw Nissa. The woman smiled, and Nissa knew why. Nissa had spoken to her on the phone not thirty minutes ago. The woman was the department secretary. “You must be Ms. Kealoha.”

“I am, thanks. Your directions were good.” Nissa spoke as she walked, because Ryan didn’t stop. He opened one of three doors in a little alcove and stepped inside a room.

Nissa followed, then stopped as her breath caught. She had been in professors’ offices hundreds of times before, and never had she seen anything like this. The windows were large, arched, and mullioned, with a view of the quad she had just crossed. Built-in bookshelves made of something that looked like mahogany covered the remaining walls. The furniture was heavy, old-fashioned, and somehow appropriate.

The desk was in what looked like an antechamber to the rest of the room (which seemed more like a small library than an office), and was the only messy thing around—if you wanted to call stacks of papers messy. Her desk at the office was truly messy—there wasn’t a stack to be seen. This was organized, even though there were more papers than she had seen outside of a recycling bin in years.

Ryan glanced at the desk as if contemplating sitting down at it, then walked past it. “Let’s sit in here. It’s more comfortable.”

But he didn’t sit down. Instead, he stood near one of the overstuffed leather chairs, and put a hand on its back.

Nissa stopped beside him, uncertain if she should sit in the other overstuffed chair or on the couch, which stood directly across from his chair.

His gaze met hers, and her heart started to beat. Hard. She wanted to kiss him. She really, really wanted to kiss him. Right now. And use the couch for something other than sitting.

It took all of her strength to break that gaze. She wondered if her pupils had dilated; she supposed they had. He had to know how attracted she was to him, right?

She didn’t want him to know, because that meant he wasn’t attracted. He hadn’t acted on it yet.

She walked over to the window and looked at the view, even though it didn’t interest her. She had rehearsed this conversation in her head, and she couldn’t remember how it was supposed to go.

So she just dove in. “I’m not sure if you remember that I work for Claus & Company.”

“I do,” he said. He sounded different here. Calmer. More relaxed. Maybe that computer thing had really upset him.

“I—um—I got into a lot of trouble for agreeing with you last month.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, as if it were his fault.

She turned. He was still holding that chair. In fact, the chair was between them like a shield. So he wasn’t attracted, and he had noticed her interest. He didn’t want her near him.

Her heart sank.

“It’s not your fault. You have a good argument.”

He shook his head, and she could tell he was going to reiterate that it wasn’t his main argument. She didn’t need to hear that.

Before he could speak, she said, “I finally convinced my bosses that they were the ones who were out of touch. But now, they expect me to start crafting Santa’s 21st century image. What they want is to keep it exactly the same, only make it different, and I want it to reflect current society, and be good for children. I know you’re not a professor of marketing or anything, but you have some really good ideas, and I think you’re right about the importance of brands and role models in the health arena and….”

She let her voice trail off. He was just staring at her, as if she had lost her mind. Maybe she had. She could do this without him. They both knew that. She should do this without him, because Santa’s image wasn’t really about marketing or branding, but about keeping him relevant in the 21st century, maybe even a force for good. And no professor of public health, no matter how sexy and charismatic, could help her with that.

So she shrugged and decided to go for broke. He was already looking at her like she was crazy; how could telling the truth make that worse?

“And, honestly,” she said, “I just wanted to see you again.”

He swallowed visibly. “You’re kidding,” he said, and then looked appalled that those words had come out of his mouth.

“No,” she said. “I’m not kidding. I—um—I haven’t been able to stop thinking of you since that day in the studio. I’ve never quite met anyone like you before.”

He let out a small laugh. “I’m not sure that’s a compliment.”

“It’s not meant as one. It’s the truth. I find you—” she decided to go for broke. “—fascinating. I find you fascinating.”

And charming and handsome and funny and appealing and oh, so, sexy. She wanted to tell him all that, but felt like she had revealed too much with “fascinating.”

His fingers clutched the top of the chair so hard that his knuckles had turned white. “I’m awake, right?”

“What?” she asked, not sure she understood him.

“This isn’t a dream, is it?” Then he shook his head and rolled his eyes just a little. “Of course, even if it is, you wouldn’t tell me. People in dreams don’t know they’re dreaming.”

“What?” she asked again.

“I’m—ah, hell.” He stepped around the chair and walked toward her. Her heart pounded. Then he put his hands on her shoulders for just a moment, standing so close to her that she could feel the heat from his body.

His gaze held hers—that magnetic gaze—and then, then, he leaned toward her slowly. He was going to kiss her or maybe he was asking permission to kiss her or maybe—

She didn’t care. She slipped her arms around his waist and pulled him close. Then she kissed him.

He tasted of sunshine mixed with just a hint of chocolate and mint. She pressed against him, felt more muscles than she had expected (public health, right? That included exercise, right?) and then melted into him.

His hand slipped from her shoulders, up her neck, cupping her chin, then getting tangled in her hair. His touch was gentle and erotic at the same time. His thumbs found the slightly pointed edges of her ears—that legacy from her mother that she had always hated—and he moaned slightly.

His kiss got more passionate, his body even closer, despite all their winter clothes. She started to slip her hands under his sweater when he suddenly broke away from her.

“I—I—I—have a class,” he said. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes bright, and his lips just a little swollen. “I’m sorry. If I didn’t stop, well, I wouldn’t have stopped. I mean, I think you’re the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen, and I’m such an idiot, I probably just ruined everything, and I want nothing more than to—”

She leaned into him, kissing him again, slipping her hands under his sweater anyway, feeling how warm his skin was. She could kiss him forever, classes be damned, but she had control too, just not as much of it as she had initially thought because this kiss was going on longer than she had originally intended and she wanted nothing more than to make him miss that class, but then he might resent her or someone might knock on the door or—

She made herself break off the kiss. She was breathing as hard as if she had just snowshoed fifteen miles.

“I—you’re right,” she said. “You need to go to your class. But I would love to take you to dinner. I’d say it was to pick your brain, but really, I just want to—”

“I know,” he said and kissed her yet again. She had been about to say get to know you better, but this was good, this was better than good, this was great in fact and perfect and her hands were reaching, not for his sweater this time, but for the edges of his pants, and she made herself stand back, even though that meant ending what she considered to be the best kiss of the three.

“Dinner?” she asked again. “Is there somewhere good around here?”

He stared at her for a long moment, as if he wasn’t sure what she was asking. Finally, he said, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

She smiled, because she didn’t know what else to do. Her mother had once told her that she should never deny a compliment, but she wanted to. She also wanted to reach out and grab him again, so she took another step backwards, just so that she wouldn’t get lost in another kiss.

“Your class,” she said as a reminder.

“Yeah, right, of course,” he said. “And dinner. God. Dinner. How about—oh, God, you’re used to Manhattan. There’s nothing good here.”

“Then let’s go somewhere bad,” she said.

His eyes twinkled, and she realized exactly how he had taken that. She wasn’t going to correct him. If he wanted to go somewhere bad with her, then she was willing.

“There’s Frank’s Country Restaurant,” he said after a moment. “Around here, we call it carbo-loaders paradise.”

“So, not a place a professor of public health should be seen,” she said.

“We public health professors are not subject to those rules,” he said, “so long as the place passes its health inspections.”

“And has it?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah.” His gaze had never left hers. If she moved even slightly, they’d be in each other’s arms again. “It’s the best worst place in town.”

“Sounds perfect,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess it does.”

16

IF HE WERE a smarter man, he would have cancelled class and just made love to her on that couch, all day long, uncurtained windows be damned. His entire job be damned. He would have sacrificed it all for her.

If he were a smarter man.

But he didn’t think of that option until he started the PowerPoint presentation, after the lights had dimmed in class, as the presentation ran more or less on its own, and he had to stay turned slightly away from the class because every time he thought of her, his body reacted in ways he didn’t want his students to see.

But it was more than just lust. He’d been in lust before, and he’d always known that once it was slaked, he would be able to walk away. This was something else. Something about this woman called to him from deep within, as if he had met a missing piece of himself, which was so stupid, because unless people truly were missing pieces of themselves (from accidents or whatever) they were always whole. Or so he had told one of his girlfriends once when she said that everyone had the perfect soul mate somewhere, the person who completed them, and he wasn’t that person for her.

You’re being unrealistic, he’d said, even though he hadn’t wanted her to stick around. He had almost told her that those high standards would make her end up alone and unwanted, but he’d stopped himself, because he recognized in that last moment just how cruel he would sound.

But those words had never left him: the lack of realism in that longing for the “perfect” mate.

Whom he had just found.

And if he told Nissa that, she’d run from him, he knew it. He would run from him if he had said that and he were her, or something like that.

His thoughts had been tangled since those kisses, and he wasn’t sure he would ever have clarity back. He wasn’t even sure how he made it through his class.

Or the next one.

Or how he had prevented himself from running down the slippery sidewalk to the faculty parking lot.

Or how he managed to drive to Frank’s Country Restaurant and how he managed not to be too early, but early enough to get a table, even though it was the dinner rush.

For sixty years, Frank’s Country Restaurant had done its best to bring the country into Upstate. In the middle of delis, diners, and bad Italian restaurants, Frank’s had once been an oasis of middle-American blandness. Now, though, it was a nostalgic place in the midst of vegan restaurants and upscale boutique restaurants so expensive that Ryan was afraid he’d pay more for a meal than he did for his mortgage payment.

Frank’s had become the go-to place for him, and for everyone else in town on a real-world salary. This evening, though, he saw it through Nissa’s Manhattan eyes, and realized he probably should have taken her to one of the upscale boutique restaurants.

The décor was shabby, the booths a bit tattered, the windows clean but scratched. No one had updated the carpet since the 1990s. There was a real jukebox in the corner that only played four songs, because the company that ran it had gone out of business years ago.

Families crowded the tables, children screamed on their way to the designated play area, and the salad bar looked like a bomb had gone off in the middle of it. (The bomb was probably a small group of ten-year-olds who were currently throwing cherry tomatoes at each other in the play area.)

Ryan let out a small sigh and wished he had gotten Nissa’s cell phone number. He also wished he had her card. Maybe the number on that would take him directly to her. Only he had deliberately tried not to memorize the number. He hadn’t wanted to dial her late one night when his resistance was down.

“Hey, Prof!” Henry Hewitt, one of his best students, waved at him from the cash register. “You meeting that gorgeous woman from the talk show?”

Ryan felt like he’d been outted in more ways than one: first, he hadn’t realized anyone in town had seen those talk shows since no one talked to him about them, and second, he hadn’t expected anyone to recognize Nissa. The fact that Henry had recognized Nissa meant she had beaten him to the restaurant. Ryan couldn’t back out now.

“Yeah, I am,” Ryan said, unable to find a better way to answer that question. “She’s here, huh?”

“In back,” Henry said. Then he grinned and said softly, “Nice goin’, Dude.”

Thanking Henry for that comment felt inappropriate, so Ryan just nodded his acknowledgement and walked to the part of the restaurant that locals considered the back. It was technically the side of the restaurant—the back was where the play area was—but it felt farther back than the play area. In class, he’d once used that discrepancy as an example of the way that perception influenced fact.

Nissa sat alone at one of ten tables. It seemed amazingly quiet here, especially in comparison to the rest of the restaurant. She had already ordered something to drink; he smelled Frank’s winter specialty hot chocolate, made with a touch of mint.

As he sat down, Ryan said, “If I’d realized what a zoo this place would be tonight, I would have picked somewhere else.”

“I like it,” Nissa said. “You don’t see a lot of places like this in my neighborhood.”

She was right; Manhattan wasn’t known for its kid-friendly restaurants except in touristy Times Square.

Ryan smiled as one of the waitresses came over. She too was a student, but not from his classes. He just recognized her from campus.

He ordered some coffee and took the offered menu. So did Nissa. But neither of them looked at it. Instead, they stared at each other.

He wondered if she regretted all those kisses this afternoon, then decided he had to stop worrying about her. She had confessed that she had come to see him, which surprised him. He had felt as if he’d been at his very worst every time she’d seen him.

“How did class go?” she asked, apparently not realize he had taught two since he last saw her.

“Better than I expected, which isn’t saying much. My PowerPoint presentation would have been a real disaster if it weren’t for you.”

She shrugged. “Nothing to it.”

“It was to me,” he said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” They stared at each other for a moment and he could feel the attraction thrumming between them.

“It’s cliché,” he said, “but I really don’t know much about you. You said you weren’t a native New Yorker…?”

It was a better conversational gambit than the ones he’d tried this afternoon. And better than asking her how she got her start with Claus & Company, which he had looked up on the internet one late night while he was staring at her card. Like most corporate websites, the Claus & Company site had told him next to nothing about the company, but unlike the others, he couldn’t drill down into the site to learn stuff the company didn’t want him to know.

“I thought you could tell from my accent,” she said. “It was pretty bad when I moved here.”

“From where?” he asked.

She looked down, which surprised him. She also started to answer and stopped herself, which surprised him more. It was almost as if she had edited her response.

“I was born in Hawaii,” she said, “but I was raised in a place no one’s ever heard of.”

“Try me,” he said.

She frowned just a little, as if she were measuring her response. Then she said something that sounded like the combination of a cough, a sneeze, and someone clearing their throat.

“Excuse me?” he said.

She repeated the noise—which was apparently a name, or a word or something. “At least,” she added, “that’s what we call it.”

And then she looked down again, as if she were embarrassed to admit she came from that place.

“What do we call it?” he asked.

She bit her lower lip. Then she closed her eyes. Finally she put a hand over her mouth, as if she were holding back words.

The entire situation had suddenly become weird.

“Nissa?” he asked.

“The North Pole,” she said after a moment. “You call it the North Pole.”

17

SHE COULDN’T LOOK at him as she said it, but she couldn’t lie to him either. The lies simply wouldn’t come out of her mouth. Twisting the truth only worked part way.

Her magic was clashing with his somehow, and it was creating an honesty that she wasn’t used to, particularly since she was in advertising, promotion, and marketing.

Or maybe, she was just so attracted to him her entire being rebelled when she tried to lie.

“Nice try,” he said. “Now, tell me where you’re really from.”

She raised her head. She was miserable. She actually wanted to spend more time with him and she now knew that was impossible.

“I’m from the North Pole,” she said.

“Yeah, right,” he said with a laugh. “Next thing you know, you’ll tell me you’re an elf.”

“Half,” she said.

He grinned, then the grin slowly faded. “Half?”

“On my mother’s side.” Her voice was flat. “My father’s mostly native Hawaiian.”

Ryan opened his mouth, then closed it. “How does that happen?” he blurted.

“Vacation,” she said, because the only other options were to explain to him how the birds and bees worked or the way that elves and humans really were sexually compatible, despite what the literature said.

“Vacation?” he asked, mimicking her tone.

She nodded, her throat constricting. She managed to say, “People take them, you know. Even elves. Usually in January.”

“Oh,” he said, clearly confused by this conversation. “So you’re on vacation?”

“I should be,” she said, feeling miserable. “Because this was a mistake.”

She pushed away from the table, rattling her hot chocolate mug. She shouldn’t have been honest—not that she had a choice—and she shouldn’t have pursued him—and there she had had a choice—and she should have just talked to him about Claus & Company and branding.

She took a ten from her wallet and put it on the table, even though that was more than her hot chocolate cost by a long ways.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and walked away.

18

SHE WAS LEAVING. Ryan stood up, not sure exactly what had happened, and hurried after her. He joined her in the main room, caught her by the arm, and said, “What just happened?”

“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “You wouldn’t believe it, no matter what I said.”

“Make me believe,” he said.

She stopped in the middle of all the misbehaving children, and looked at them as if they held the secret to life.

“That’s the thing,” she said. “I can’t make anyone believe anything. It’s against the rules.”

And she shook him off.

This time, he couldn’t catch up with her. By the time he reached the front door, she had vanished. He didn’t even see a car pulling out of the parking lot.

He stood in the cold for a long moment, staring into the darkness.

The parking lot was empty; the road was empty. Even the cross streets were empty. It was as if she had never existed.

He had no idea what had happened. He hadn’t said anything wrong, that he knew of. He’d asked her about her life, and she’d told him about…the North Pole?

Was she crazy?

Was he?

Because part of him did believe her. She had pointed ears. He’d seen them. Her business card never tattered, despite how he held it. She always talked about branding Santa, as if she were in control of that.

Santa couldn’t be real. Because Ryan’s Uncle Dave had played Santa at every Christmas party since Ryan could remember. His Uncle Dave, who was a bit too fat, whose ears were round and whose cheeks were rosy—not from cold, but from broken capillaries, just like his nose was too red. Uncle Dave, whom everyone struggled to keep sober until his time with the kids was over.

“Professor Palmer?” Henry peered out the door. “You gonna order?”

What did Ryan say about this? That his date had run off? That she was half-elf? That she was crazy?

That he thought maybe he was in love with her anyway? That the tips of those ears turned him on like nothing else ever had in his entire life?

“Yeah,” Ryan said after a moment. “Yeah, I guess I will order. Just give me a minute, okay?”

“Okay,” Henry said, and closed the door.

Ryan stood outside a moment longer, his arms wrapped around himself, shivering, watching his breath fog in and out.

Christmas. The North Pole, Claus & Company, Santa in the 21st century. Elves.

He should have been appalled—and he was—but for the wrong reason.

He should have stopped her.

Instead, he had let her walk away.

19

DUMB. THAT’S WHAT she was. Dumb. She’d dated guys in the Greater World before, and she’d lied to them the whole time. If she accidentally used magic, she said it was luck or just something weird or, worse, she’d tell them they hadn’t seen what they had just seen.

She had pretty much kept to herself, though, because the strain of keeping the lies straight was always a tad too hard. And she didn’t want to date any of the men—human, elven, or a mixture—at the Pole because long-distance relationships didn’t work.

And, to be honest, everyone in the Pole (and some of the Claus & Company people outside of it) had a pretty insular view of the world. All the worlds—the Greater World and the magical world.

She had actually used magic to get to her car. She’d propelled herself there, rather like flying but not quite, because she couldn’t quite manage that. More like running super fast—something every child learned and something she hadn’t done in years. Then she had cloaked the car in an invisibility spell.

She hadn’t driven away. She just sat inside the car, watching Ryan as he stood in the door to the restaurant, looking at the parking lot, then scanning the roads. Was he hoping to see her? Maybe. Maybe he thought it was all a joke.

Maybe he thought she’d apologize, or maybe he’d lie to her and say that he did believe, when clearly he didn’t. Santa was a fictional character to him, an advertising creation, an example in Ryan’s long book on the importance of the individual in public health.

She shouldn’t have come here. She shouldn’t have tried to talk to him. She should have stayed in Manhattan and let that one day in December remain one of her most special memories. One she could watch over and over again in digital download, just to see his handsome face.

Which continued to scan the parking lot as if he knew she were there.

Finally, one of the wait staff peered out the door, talked to him for a moment, and then went inside. Ryan nodded, gave the parking lot one last look, and followed the young man through the door.

It was over.

Maybe the Old Boys were right: maybe she had mishandled all of this because of her attraction to Ryan. Not that the Old Boys knew about the attraction; they hadn’t, and they hadn’t accused her of it.

But they had thought her judgment was clouded, and they might have been right.

Santa was her responsibility. Updating the Greater World New York office was her new task.

She was supposed to think about the future of Claus & Company, not about her relationship with a professor named Ryan Palmer.

Who kissed like no one she had ever met.

Who attracted her like no one she had ever known.

Who would be impossible to forget.

20

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, Ryan still didn’t understand what had happened, and that bothered him. Because he was a logical man who could generally figure out most things, given enough time.

He’d gone to his office at four A.M. when he couldn’t sleep, and except for leaving once to teach a two-hour lab, he had spent the entire time on his computer, reading about the historical Santa Claus.

If, indeed, anyone could call Santa historical.

But, he supposed, people could label Santa historical. Because the creation of the beloved children’s character could be traced. There was a trail, which began with the myths and legends of all the Northern European countries. They all had different names for him, like Father Christmas and St. Nicholas. But there were parts in all of those creations in the modern American Santa Claus.

That Santa seemed to appear first in the American Civil War. By the beginning of the 20th century, Santa was used to sell things, including—one could argue—Christmas itself. Selling things made sense, because advertising really picked up at the turn of the last century—in newspapers, magazines, and other things.

Ryan had actually done research into the rise of mass media and its impact on public health. Public health advocates hadn’t used mass media properly except in cases of severe contagion or a short-term threat to a community.

Before the debacle of the last book and the stupid book tour, he’d actually been thinking his next book would be about ways to use media to change images of health. Those thoughts had led to the Santa chapter. He had considered it a toe into the realm of media and health.

He hadn’t expected to get burned.

He wasn’t sure he would ever write another book. Wendy had told him that he was a celebrity now, and his work would get scrutinized. She had also told him that she would represent him through the university, and he would be able to get on any show he wanted. The president of the university seconded that, wanting the press for the school.

Ryan didn’t want to do any of it. Just thinking about Santa brought it all back.

But he forced himself, because if he didn’t, he might not ever see Nissa again. He wanted to see her. Even if she was crazy.

Health. He had to focus on health, including his. The very idea of losing Nissa had taken him out of his comfort zone, and he found that crazy all by itself.

Because he had never had her. He had met her twice and been somewhat obsessed with her. He had used the memory of her to get himself through a difficult experience, and that had forced him to focus on her.

That was all.

He rubbed his hand over his eyes. They ached from lack of sleep and because of the research he’d done, with the lights down and squinting at his computer.

He wouldn’t have done the research if he were merely focused on her. He’d found other women stunningly beautiful or intellectually intriguing. He’d thought about them a lot, but when he was with them, he never felt like he had just been with the one person he’d spent his whole life waiting for.

And if he tried to apply his logical brain to that thought, his logical brain sent all kinds of warning signals to the rest of him. Because he had never ever believed in soul mates or in true love or in love at first sight. He believed in long-term friendships and relationships that grew and became something else.

Even though he’d never really experienced those either.

He stood up, stretched, and heard his back crack. He’d clearly been sitting here too long, researching and not processing the information.

He had been trying to figure out more than just Santa. He’d been trying to figure out what was going on in his own head. Or, to be more accurate, in his own heart.

And maybe internet research was the wrong approach.

What if he had misunderstood her? Was she an “elf” as in an employee of this company called Claus & Company which (somewhat secretly) controlled Santa’s brand?

She hadn’t said anything about magic. Maybe she had been making a joke about being half-elven—or elfish? Jeez, he didn’t even know what a group of elves were called. (And why would he? He was a scientist, not an elf expert.)

Nissa hadn’t said that she knew a man who could fly all over the world in one night, deliver toys to only the best children (ignoring all the poor ones), and somehow still remain a hero.

She didn’t seem delusional. The studios in New York didn’t treat her that way.

The studios in New York didn’t think so. In fact, the producers on Becker’s show had called her a go-to guest. So someone had vetted her, right?

She had seemed sane. She was sane. Although her reaction after telling him she was from the North Pole had been weird. Had she seen the perplexed look on his face? Had he made some kind of judgmental expression, something that a sensitive woman who had just put herself on the line would run from?

Why had she run from him? She had called their dinner—or her trip to the university—a mistake. A mistake.

Clearly he had done something wrong.

He shoved his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and walked to the windows. The safety lamps, installed every 15 feet, sent a warm, yellow glow along the paths, making the campus look like something out of an early 20th century idyll. A few students walked by, their shapes indistinct because of the frozen moisture in the air.

He had been the problem, not her. He had gone up to her and asked her to help him believe. Maybe they had spoken at cross-purposes. He had asked her what happened, and she had responded: You wouldn’t believe it, no matter what I said.

Believe what? He had assumed she was talking about Santa, when she might have been talking about his expression or the fact that she hated the food in the restaurant or maybe that she had never dated. He hadn’t asked for clarification.

Instead, stupidly, he had assumed that she had been talking about Santa Claus. Santa Claus. Whose name hadn’t even come up in the conversation.

In fact, he believed that the conversation had been about Santa so much that he had spent the last ten hours researching the “historical” man, not thinking about Nissa.

Thinking about Santa.

Ryan leaned his head against the window’s cool glass. He had asked Nissa to “make him believe.” And even that question had been wrong.

Because he clearly believed. He believed so deep down that he thought there was a possibility that she worked for Santa—or that she thought she worked for Santa. And then Ryan had blamed her for being crazy or delusional, when that very assumption was just crazy or delusional.

Whatever had given him the idea that she was a “real” elf? Or a “real” half-elf. Her pointed ears? A lot of perfectly normal humans had pointed ears. And hers weren’t even that pointed. They just had a nifty little tip to them that, even as he thought of it, still turned him on.

He groaned.

He had been the idiot, not her. He had made some kind of face, he had maybe not understood a joke, he had taken everything too seriously, just like he always had, and she had fled from him.

She had fled.

He lifted his head, his forehead still chilled from the window.

For the entire time he’d known her, he’d been exhausted, overwhelmed, and out of his depth. Even his brother had noted at Christmas that Ryan hadn’t seemed like himself.

Teaching didn’t bring him the joy it had years ago, and even standing here made him uncomfortable.

Ryan had been off and his reactions had been off and he had probably offended Nissa without even realizing it.

He owed her an apology.

He had her business card on his desk. He could call her.

And she could hang up on him.

Or he could go to Manhattan and drop in at her office, maybe buy her lunch, maybe try again.

She would probably say no to that, but at least they would have one last opportunity.

At least, he would get to see her one last time.

21

THE OFFICES OF Claus & Company were on Madison Avenue in a building the company had owned since the 1920s. Claus & Company was its own corporation, but it also owned a major advertising company—one that Oskar had started in the 1940s. That company still existed, and it was still very, very important in the US advertising business, but it had little to do with Nissa’s work.

Until today. She had scheduled an appointment to talk with their president, their top-earning adman, and the most up-and-coming person in the firm, whoever that might be.

The meeting had gone pretty well. She had brought in a list of questions from the most basic to some very complex ones. She knew better than to change a brand immediately—Coke had famously made that mistake in the 1980s, and it was still the poster-child for what not to do—but she also knew they had to slide Santa’s image into the 21st century.

She wanted a proposal from the ad firm, and they promised her one. She also knew that the moment she had left the president’s office, he had called Oskar to see if she was authorized to do this.

She tried to pretend it didn’t bother her.

She was trying to pretend that a lot of things didn’t bother her. She was trying to pretend that nothing bothered her, particularly that ill-advised drive two days ago to see Ryan.

Professor Palmer. She wasn’t going to call him Ryan any more. That implied a familiarity she didn’t want to think about, just like she didn’t want to think about those kisses. Just like she didn’t want to think about the look on his face when she got up from the table, or the way he had peered into the parking lot when she was hiding from him.

She had felt ridiculous in that moment: it had taken all of her strength not to go back and apologize.

And then what? Even more ridicule, this time from him, as she told him about magic and how the system worked to make sure there were enough toys, how Claus & Company was working to make sure children didn’t fall through the cracks.

She couldn’t explain her life any more than he—or anyone from the Greater World—could understand it.

She took the elevator to her office. This old building had been remodeled so many times in her short tenure that she was always surprised to see the wall of mirrors, the dark wood paneling, and the fancy buttons on the elevator itself. In her mind, it was still a 1970s box that shuddered as it moved.

Everything had changed in the years since she’d started working here, and she used to accept that as part of life in this building. Now, she saw it as a passage of time. She’d been here long enough to see three iterations of the elevator design, for heaven’s sake, and only now was she getting enough clout to actually do something about Santa’s image.

Even though the clout wasn’t that great; not if the president of the ad agency below was calling Oskar to see if Nissa actually had the authority to hire the agency to present a few ideas.

She decided she wasn’t going to focus on any of it any more. She had some ideas on her tablet, ideas she hadn’t told the ad guys about because she wanted to come up with her own campaign. She would develop the best thing for her company, all on her own. She still had to present it to Oskar and the Old Boys anyway; it would be best if the ideas that got so horribly shot down (and all her ideas would get shot down; she just knew it) would be hers, so she didn’t have to blame someone else.

Maybe then she would quit, permanently move to New York, and get some fluffy show on her favorite network, talking about advertising and media relations or about holidays or images or something she could convince them she was qualified to talk about for one hour once a week.

She was so engrossed in her work that she barely noticed her secretary clear his throat as she walked by. Fyodor rarely did that, even when he was ill, so she took two more steps before the sound actually registered.

She raised her head and saw—

Ryan, sitting on the red-and-white striped candy-cane couch that had been in the office since the dawn of time. He stood as his gaze met hers.

Fyodor, who had escaped the Pole as soon as he graduated from secondary school and who was using this job to fund his way through NYU to get a degree in theater, raised his eyebrows. His lips were twisted in a slight smile, as if the entire situation amused him.

Which it probably did. He had been one of the people who had urged her to go Upstate, just to see where she stood, and then had been disappointed when she returned, unwilling to talk.

To talk. About Ryan. Who was standing here, looking very uncertain. And very handsome in a pair of tight blue jeans and a black sweater that accented his broad shoulders and dark hair.

“Hi,” he said, sounding uncertain. “I thought maybe I owed you an apology.”

“You didn’t do anything,” she said. “I was the one who ran out on you.”

Fyodor’s eyebrows rose even higher, something Nissa hadn’t thought possible.

She gave him a withering glance, not that it would make a difference. He would react as long as she and Ryan stood in the reception area.

“Why don’t you come into my office?” she asked, even though she really didn’t want him to. She didn’t want to explain herself, she didn’t want to humiliate herself, she didn’t want to think about that evening any more.

Even though she couldn’t really stop thinking about it.

Without waiting for Ryan’s answer, she pushed open the office door and stepped inside. Like everything at Claus & Company, her office smelled faintly of peppermint and evergreen. She only noticed the scent when someone else sniffed the air and looked both surprised and pleased.

Her office was large for Manhattan—a corner suite that had once belonged to Oskar, it was larger than most apartments. She had a couch, a large desk in one corner, and her computer desk in another. Her view wasn’t as impressive—she got to see the street and nearby buildings—but it was better than no view at all.

Ryan closed the door behind him, and her heart started to race. The last time she had been alone with him in an office, she had kissed him silly.

This time, she put Oskar’s old desk between herself and Ryan.

“Have a seat,” she said, hoping she sounded calmer than she felt.

Ryan looked at the chair in front of the desk as if it would trap him. “I don’t plan to stay long enough,” he said. “I just wanted to say I was sorry. I enjoyed our time together, and I know that something went wrong, and it was probably me—”

“It wasn’t you,” she said. That honesty, leaping out of her. She should have agreed with him. She should have blown him off. They weren’t suited, and he didn’t even know why. She didn’t want to tell him why, either, because then he’d either think her a lunatic, or she would violate the rules of the North Pole and Claus & Company. She didn’t like either choice.

“I don’t pretend to understand what happened,” he said, looking at that chair again. “But I do know I wasn’t at my best in either of our encounters. I find you fascinating, Nissa, and I’d love to get to know you better—”

“That’s the point,” she said. “You can’t.”

He let out a slow breath. “Because you’re already involved with someone?”

He sounded hopeful, as if that were the problem instead of her weird behavior in the restaurant.

“Because of this job,” she said, and hoped it would be enough.

“I understand when someone has to work long hours,” he said.

She shook her head. “Please, Ryan,” she said. “I’m not sure I can explain this in a way that will satisfy both of us.”

That, at least, was true.

He frowned. For a moment, she thought he was going to turn around and leave. Then he sighed, pulled the chair back, and sat down heavily.

“Give it a try,” he said.

She closed her eyes. If only he would leave. But part of her was happy he was staying, happy that he wasn’t going to take no for an answer, happy—that he’d end up thinking ill of her?

She opened her eyes. “Would you like some hot cocoa?” It was the only gambit she had.

“No,” he said. “I just want to talk.”

“Coffee, then,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Please, just—”

“I think you should have coffee,” she said, and waved her right hand. Little sparkles—almost like glitter—covered the air around her. Then a red-and-green Santa mug filled with coffee appeared on the desk in front of Ryan.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

She wasn’t going to tell him, not yet, despite the fact that the word magic just about tripped off her tongue. She kept the word back and instead said, “Do you take cream or sugar?”

He peered into the mug. The coffee was black and rich; the best she could think of. “Soy milk,” he said almost absently.

She waved her hand again, and the glitter reappeared. He was still looking at the mug. She could see the liquid from her perch on the edge of her chair. The coffee was a milk-chocolate color now.

“Too much?” she asked. “Too little?”

“Just right,” he said in a small Baby-Bear voice. But he didn’t pick up the mug. “You didn’t answer me. How did you do that?”

This time the word fell out of her mouth. “Magic.”

He looked up at her. That jolt when his gaze met hers, it never disappointed. It always made her feel special, even now, even when it was clear he was perturbed.

“Is that your usual answer when you don’t want to explain something?” he asked. “You said the same thing about the projector.”

The projector and his comments that day reminded her of something. “You told me that you always have trouble with technology,” she said.

“Don’t change the subject,” he said.

“I’m not,” she said. “Just bear with me. Technology. It fritzes around you, doesn’t it? I noticed you don’t keep your computer on your main desk. Neither do I.”

She indicated the computer desk across the room.

“Still,” she said, “I go through a computer every 18 months. So does everyone else in this office.”

“Get your electrical system checked,” he said, sounding annoyed.

“It’s not the electrical system,” she said. “The advertising agency downstairs doesn’t have this problem. Neither does the modeling agency upstairs. Just us.”

He sighed. “Why is this relevant?”

“Because,” she said, “you told me that the studios you went to always had equipment failure, but you knew it couldn’t be about you. Yet, if you were to call the studio where we met and ask them how many times equipment failed around me, you know what they’d say?”

“Stop wasting our time?” he asked.

“Every fourth visit,” she said, ignoring his tone. “It’s a standing joke with us. They think it’s the luck of the draw. It’s not.”

His shoulders slumped. “You’re not one of those people who claims to have some kind of weird energy that destroys electronics, are you? Someone who says watches don’t run around them.”

“They don’t run on you, do they?” Nissa asked, taking a gamble. He wasn’t wearing a watch. “You always blame it on lack of care or the fact that you buy cheap watches, but you stopped wearing them, what, when you were twelve? Thirteen?”

His gaze narrowed. She was right; she could tell from his expression. “Why is this important?” he asked.

She snapped her fingers and the mug of coffee disappeared.

“I’d be more impressed if this were my office,” he said. “Then I’d know the desk wasn’t rigged, and I would know you hadn’t performed some kind of parlor trick.”

“Hold your hand out flat,” she said.

He gave her a weird look, then did it. She snapped her fingers a second time, and the coffee mug reappeared balanced on his palm, a candy cane stirring stick in the center of it.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” he said.

“Magic,” she said again.

He stared at the coffee. The mug had to be burning his palm. He took his left hand and grabbed the mug’s handle, then took a sip. The candy cane stir-stick hit him in the nose. He frowned.

“I have two questions,” he said after he finished swallowing. “Do you really believe you work for the ‘real’ Santa Claus, and what does my lack of a watch have to do with anything?”

She wanted to answer the second question first. It was the easier question. Kinda. Sorta. But she knew better than to do that. The first question was the one that would guarantee whether or not he would stay in the room. The second question might just remain permanently unanswered.

She sighed. “I work for the real Santa Claus.”

He let out a small snort and shook his head. But he didn’t move. “A guy who flies around the world one night a year, gives toys only to ‘deserving’ kids, and then crawls back in his ice cave.”

“No,” she said. “That guy doesn’t exist.”

Ryan frowned, then took another sip of his coffee. He ran a finger along the edge of her desk where the mug had first appeared, apparently felt nothing, and then set the mug in that spot.

She was tempted to make it disappear again, but she didn’t.

“So you work for…a company that ‘owns’ Santa’s brand? And they call all the people who work for that company ‘elves’?” His emphasis on the two words was so strong, she almost expected him to make air quotes with his fingers.

“No,” she said. “I work for Claus & Company. We’ve been around for centuries, and we are run by someone that the world calls Santa Claus. We mostly focus on charitable works, but the toy-giveaway has been part of our focus for centuries. We can’t do that with everyone, so we give children of other traditions what we can. That’s really not my area. I handle public relations in the United States—”

“Public relations,” he said. “For a man who flies around the world in one night. Which is physically impossible.”

“Yeah, it would be,” she said. “If it weren’t for magic.”

He nodded. This was the telling moment, the moment when he should walk away. “And you’re magical.”

“You are too,” she blurted.

“Now you’re going to tell me that every kid has magic,” he said, “and then we’re going to sing a happy tune.”

She smiled in spite of herself. “No,” she said. “Not everyone has magic. But you have a lot, which shows up as charisma and charm. Your family is also extremely long-lived, and I would wager that they immigrated from a middle-European country that either no longer exists or from an area no genealogist can track down exactly.”

He leaned back a little. She was spot-on, she knew it. “You researched my family?”

“No,” she said. “I just know a Charming when I meet one.”

“A Charming,” he said.

She didn’t want to explain how all the magic systems were related, from elves to fairies to fairy tales to mythological figures. It would take forever, and he wouldn’t believe her.

But she would wager, if she or someone at Claus & Company tracked down his genealogy, they would find that he was a relation several times removed from one of the royal families, the ones that spawned all the Charmings of fairy tale myths.

Not that he would know that or even believe it.

She waved her hand dismissively, and didn’t do any magic at that moment. She shook her head at the same time.

“None of this matters,” she said. “I like you. You like me, and we’re just not suited. You’ll never believe me, not that it really matters, because ultimately, you’re grounded in this world, and my feet are firmly planted in a different one.”

His eyes narrowed. “Grounded in this world?”

“You have family here, and friends, and students who probably adore you, and classes to teach, things to do that you loved so much you couldn’t wait to return to them. Or your university. Whereas I am in Manhattan much of the time, and the rest of the time, I’m in the North Pole—not the one the British kept trying to conquer in the 19th century, but the one you see on television specials and in kids’ books, the one that’s replicated in every mall in American starting just after Thanksgiving—”

“If we’re lucky,” he muttered. “These days it’s usually Halloween.”

She stopped and stared at him. He shouldn’t have said that. He should continue protesting. Part of him was listening to her, and that surprised her. No one from the Greater World had ever listened to her before.

He dropped his gaze first. He reached for the coffee, then cupped the mug. The candy cane stir stick had melted down to half its size. When he swirled the coffee inside the mug, the cane fell all the way into the liquid.

“What if I asked you again what I asked you in the restaurant?” he said.

“You asked me what happened,” she said.

“After that,” he said. “I asked you to make me believe.”

“You didn’t know what you were asking,” she said.

“Theoretically, I do now,” he said.

Her heart pounded. “Why would you ask that? You think I’m crazy.”

He shrugged one shoulder. He was still looking inside that coffee mug as if it held the secret to his existence.

“You know,” he said, “life has never been normal for my family. It’s always been—a little better than normal, at least by other people’s standards. It’s like the book. I wrote a public health manifesto, and I ended up all over national television. It isn’t what I wanted, but it’s not normal.”

She smiled in spite of herself.

“My first girlfriend, in high school, she said that it seemed like my family led a charmed life. We were all smart, good-looking people, whom everyone liked. She said—and, looking back, I think this is pretty wise for a seventeen year-old—she said, every family had at least one person no one liked or who wasn’t as successful or something. She said it was like one person took all the family’s bad luck and held it, and we didn’t have that person. We still don’t.”

Nissa tilted her head just a little. He could be…convinced? Really? She wouldn’t have expected it. Although she had never tried to convince anyone in the Greater World before.

His gaze met hers. That jolt—again. She wondered if it would ever go away, and then she realized that she didn’t want it to. Not ever.

Her heart twisted.

“You said that I seemed grounded here, in this place, with my university and my students. But teaching is getting repetitive. And I found myself wondering if there’s anything more. That’s one of the reasons I wrote the book.” He sipped more of the coffee. “That kind of more, I can do without.”

“Yeah,” she said. “So you’re not tied here.”

“I love my family. But they have their own lives,” he said. “And I’m single.”

He put an emphasis on single, as if he thought she might not believe it.

“You want me to help you believe,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You’re sure?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, and he sounded certain. But how could he be certain? He didn’t know what he was asking.

She could talk him to death or she could take him home. She grabbed his right hand across the desk, and whispered, “Home, please.”

And hoped that this extreme gesture would work—even though she didn’t really think it would.

22

HER HAND WAS warm. His was too hot, from that weird coffee mug that had just appeared. And it took all of his strength not to be impressed and/or weirded out by that. He still clutched the mug in his other hand as she whispered, “Home, please.”

Then snowflakes whooshed around him like a television snowstorm, perfect little cartoon flakes against a blue-black background. He felt faintly dizzy, but Nissa’s hand in his steadied him. And the coffee mug. Somehow he hadn’t let go of the coffee mug.

The swirling stopped, and he found himself in a too-hot living room that smelled faintly of cats. It looked like someone had vomited Christmas decorations all over the furniture—Santa blankets, red-and-green crocheted pillows, gigantic plastic candy canes on the walls along with family photos rimmed by those fake holiday frames that seemed to overrun the malls at Christmas time.

Bing Crosby and David Bowie dueted on “Little Drummer Boy,” and Ryan was about to ask if this was all some kind of strange dream when a woman swore behind him.

He turned, saw a round woman with red cheeks and white hair. She held a frozen dinner in her right hand and a loaf of French bread in the other. She was looking at Nissa, who was standing beside him, not across from him like she had a moment ago.

“I wasn’t going to eat the whole thing,” the round woman said, as if she’d been caught doing something bad. “I just—”

“It’s all right, Mother,” Nissa said in a tone that implied it wasn’t all right. “I didn’t mean to drop in on you like this.”

“I’m trying to follow the diet, honestly I am,” Nissa’s mother said in that defensive way that alcoholics who had been caught drinking used.

“I know, Mother,” Nissa said sadly.

She squeezed Ryan’s hand, then let it go. He felt the loss as if he’d lost the only real thing in the room. (Except that damn coffee mug.)

“Mother, I’d like you to meet Ryan Palmer.”

Her mother smiled, and then—finally—Ryan saw the resemblance. Her mother had been stunning once, the kind of stunning Nissa was. Only her mother was shorter and had probably always been rounder, even decades ago. Her skin was lighter too, and her eyes were the same color blue his were. But that smile was spectacular. Heart-stopping. No wonder she had found love on vacation; men had probably followed her everywhere.

“The infamous Professor Palmer,” her mother said. “I should have recognized you.”

“Mother…” Nissa said. “When would you have seen him?”

“You think I wasn’t going to watch you on television?” her mother asked. “I never miss anything you’re on. Sometimes I’m late to the party, but I eventually get to see it all.”

Nissa looked horrified. But her mother didn’t seem to notice.

“I knew from the way you two looked at each other,” her mother said, “that I’d end up meeting you eventually. I suppose this is your first time to the North Pole, Professor?”

Ryan opened his mouth and then closed it. He realized, in that second, that he could deny it all. He could shake that coffee mug at Nissa and say, You drugged this, and she would look at him with great disappointment. Or, he could choose to believe—and yes, it was a choice—and go with the vision. Or the truth. Or whatever this was.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s my first time.”

“Well,” her mother said, that impish smile still on her face. “I’ll bet you don’t believe any of this. My husband didn’t on his first trip. And he froze his sexy butt off.”

“Mother,” Nissa said.

“He did,” her mother said. “He refused to change out of his Speedo before I brought him. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“No,” Nissa said flatly. “You never mentioned that part.”

“Oh, how your grandmother laughed,” her mother said. “At least you’re dressed properly, Professor.”

“It’s January,” he said, and then remembered that people wore Speedos in Hawaii in January, which had to be what Nissa’s mother was referring to. That Vacation Meet. “In New York, anyway.”

“And you’ve decided to convince him to what?” Nissa’s mother asked her. “To fall in love with you?”

His heart pounded. It couldn’t be a spell could it? The way he thought about Nissa? That wasn’t magic was it?

“Mother, I don’t have that kind of magic, and if I did—”

“It’s too late anyway,” Ryan said.

They both looked at him. Nissa looked like she was about to cry. He realized in that moment that she believed he was going to demand to return to New York, to get out of this craziness, to be somewhere else.

“I think,” he said, because he decided it was time to tell the truth, no matter what he believed. “I think I’m in love with you already.”

23

NISSA HADN’T EXPECTED it. Especially now, in her mother’s too-hot living room near the frozen dinner that would probably contribute to her mother’s early death. The cats were hiding, it was snowing outside, and Bing Crosby’s last Christmas album was on a loop. Apparently, her mother had been feeling down.

She wasn’t down any more. She was trying not to laugh. Her eyes twinkled, like any good elf’s eyes did when they were extremely happy.

“I just want you to know we can’t do that kind of magic spell,” Nissa said. “It’s not possible—it’s black magic, dark magic, and the Pole neutralizes—”

“Shut up, child,” her mother said. “He didn’t ask.”

Nissa would have asked. She had a hunch he thought of asking. But he hadn’t asked. He hadn’t asked.

“You believe me?” Nissa said.

“About the magic?” he said. “Either this is the most vivid dream I’ve ever had, or there’s more in this world than dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.”

“Hamlet,” her mother said, clasping her hands together. “You found a man who quotes Hamlet.”

“Only when I’m rattled,” Ryan said.

Her mother’s laughter trilled through the room. Nissa smiled as well.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” her mother said. “Kiss him already.”

Nissa glanced at him, then decided not to take her mother’s advice. Because the kind of kissing she wanted to do was the kind of kissing a woman did not do in front of her mother.

Nissa sent that message to Ryan with her eyes, and he seemed to get it, because he smiled at her.

“So,” he said, “is this the entire North Pole or is there more to show me?”

“There’s an entire world to show you,” she said. “May I borrow some coats, Mother?”

“Be my guest,” her mother said. And then she touched Ryan’s arm. “Welcome to our little corner of the universe, Professor Charming.”

“That’s not my—”

“Don’t even try,” Nissa said. “Mother’s magical ability is to identify magic. She was calling you that for my benefit. I figured it out on my own, Mother.”

“Hmm,” her mother said. “There’s hope for you yet.”

Nissa grabbed two coats and hustled Ryan outdoors. The air was no colder than it had been in Manhattan that morning, but the snow was drier. It crunched under their feet.

This part of the village glowed yellow with artificial light. Contrary to myth and television legend, no one had Christmas lights on here year round. If they could have made the place into a tropical paradise in January, someone would have done so.

“Sorry about my mother,” she said.

“Don’t apologize,” he said. “She’s the one who convinced me.”

“Convinced you of what?” Nissa asked as she stopped on the path.

“That this is real. She loves you. I can feel it. And she’s lonely.”

“Yeah,” Nissa said. “She is.”

He threaded his fingers through hers. “I’ll be honest. I’m deeply and thoroughly freaked out by all of this. And, at the same time, it feels right.”

“It does?” she asked.

“Like I’ve known it all along,” he said.

She smiled. “That’s just because of the myths and legends.”

“I actually suspect the commercialization of Christmas. My favorite movie as a child was Miracle on 34th Street.”

“No, it wasn’t,” she said.

“Yes, it was,” he said. “I always wanted Santa to walk into my life. And now, apparently, he can.”

She felt that tightness in her heart. Was he here for Santa then—

“And no, it’s not about Santa,” he said. “it’s about magic. I’ve always believed that love is a form of magic. The kind you get in real life.”

“It is,” she whispered. “Just not love spells.”

“I know,” he said. “Speaking of, you’ve left me hanging.”

“What?” she asked.

He paused for a half second before he spoke. “Your mother said you should kiss me.”

But that was obviously not what he had meant to say. He’d declared his love for her, and she hadn’t said anything in return.

She wrapped her fingers through his. Somewhere along the way, he had set down that silly coffee mug. Probably on one of her mother’s over-decorated tables.

“When I was little,” she said, “and I heard my parents talk about how fast they fell in love, I didn’t believe them. I told my mother I would never bring anyone here unprepared.”

“Yet you brought me,” he said.

She nodded. “Because I love you. And I didn’t expect to.”

“I thought you were trying to drive me away,” he said.

“I was,” she said. “I was so afraid that if you rejected me or what I am that I couldn’t take it. But I can’t lie to you, Ryan. From the moment I met you, I couldn’t. And believe me, surviving in the Greater World requires a lot of finesse.”

“You don’t live here, then?” he asked.

“I prefer New York,” she said.

He smiled. “We come from two different worlds.”

“No kidding,” she said.

“I meant, I’m a professor and you’re a media consultant.”

“Image Specialist,” she said.

“I stand corrected. Image Specialist,” he said. “Those worlds are very different.”

“As different as this one and the Greater World,” she said.

“Maybe even more so,” he said. “But I’ve been thinking about it. I want to keep teaching. Just in a different way.”

“Meaning?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and then looked around the area. “I think I have a lot to learn.”

“I think you have a lot to teach,” she said. “The people here need to understand how media image has an impact on lives.”

“I’m not a media consultant,” he said, his fingers loose in hers. She liked the feel of them against hers.

“But you have a lot to say,” she said, “and it’s sensible.”

He sighed. “It doesn’t look like I belong here.”

“We need you,” she said. “My mother needs you, and everyone like her. They need to change some things about their lives—”

“No one likes a nag,” he said, and she winced. Then he frowned. “Is that what your mother meant when you came? That you’ve been—”

“Oh, don’t say it,” she said. “She’s got so many health problems.”

He turned so that he could face her, keeping his hand entwined with hers. “That’s what you meant about teach?”

She nodded. “I’m losing this fight. I’m losing her.”

“But the magic—”

“Doesn’t stop death,” she said.

He looked both startled and sad.

“We can work together,” she said. “I can help with imagery back home, and you can help with education here.”

“Back home,” he said. “Isn’t this home?”

She made herself smile. “New York is home for me.”

“I know you live there, but—

“It’s home,” she said. “I don’t think I can live here anymore.”

He pulled her closer. “So if we—are—together, then we live—?”

“In the United States,” she said. And wondered if that disappointed him.

He smiled. His wonderful eyes started to twinkle. “We’d have both worlds?”

“Yes,” she said, “and I can explain them to you.”

“Good,” he said. “Because I want to hear all about this. After you fulfill your promise to me.”

It was her turn to smile. And then she leaned in for the kiss. It was the kind of kiss no one gave in front of their mother. It was deep and passionate and warmed her right up.

“I have an apartment in Manhattan,” she said.

“Not here?” he asked against her lips.

“A room in my mother’s house,” she said.

“Can we get back to New York?” he asked.

“Your wish…” she started, but he put a finger on her lips.

“Don’t say it,” he said. “That’s too close to I Dream of Jeanne to me, and that show creeped me out.”

“You have magic too,” she said.

“But I don’t know how to use it,” he said.

“Oh,” she said as she spelled them back to her Manhattan apartment, “yes, you do.”

EPILOGUE

HE COULD CHARM her mother. Ryan could charm anyone, but the fact that he could charm Nissa’s mother surprised Nissa more than she could admit. He was the one who figured out that her mother wouldn’t go to Greater World doctors because Nissa had wanted to take her to New York.

He simply said they should go to Hawaii, and have her mother see doctors there.

Of course, he didn’t tell her mother that. He told her mother that she would be attending a wedding.

Which she did.

After her doctor’s appointments.

And Nissa’s entire Hawaiian family showed up, along with Ryan’s family—charming people all. The wedding didn’t even feel cobbled together, although it took place in February, and his family seemed to think it had all happened fast.

Maybe. But she was getting used to fast. She had fallen for him fast. He said he had fallen for her fast. And they had progressed from disbelief to belief to oh, my God, this is fantastic in the space of an afternoon.

Waiting a month for a wedding seemed like an eternity.

They had already decided to work together. They knew they could help each other, with family, with their jobs, with their strange magicks. But she figured it would all work out.

Because he had gotten her mother to see doctors who could actually help her.

And Nissa believed that to be a miracle.

Almost on par with the miracle of meeting him.

He called it all magic.

And, she had to admit, he was absolutely right.

Once Upon A Time…

Not too long ago…but long enough to be somewhen else…

1

RAINE WILKINS STOOD in the ankle-deep snow, staring over the hedge. The mansion’s golden interior light spilled across the massive yard. All of the trees and shrubs beside the building were covered in silver fairy lights, with a touch of red and green, tastefully placed to hint at the season. A gigantic Christmas tree stood in the floor-to-ceiling bay window of the ballroom, but the other windows—also large—revealed couples waltzing as if they were extras in a Fred Astaire movie.

The women wore long dresses that flowed with their every movement, their hair short and styled or long and piled on top of their heads, held in place with tiaras and bows and jewelry that glittered. The men wore tuxes with tails that added to the sense of motion.

She could almost hear the music.

Someday, she would dance like that. Someday, she would be invited to these glitzy, glamorous parties. Someday, she would be one of the glittering women, swirling around the dance floor as if bred for it.

She wasn’t bred for it, of course. She stood in the snow, her ancient boots starting to leak, her ratty (but warm) parka wrapped around her, her gloved hands tucked inside the sleeves, creating a makeshift muff. She had forgotten a hat, and she didn’t want to put the hood up because it would block her vision. The parka was heavy-duty, the kind built for a good Midwestern winter, the kind they’d had when she was a kid, the kind the weather forecasters said they would have this year.

She shouldn’t be here. She had told herself she would drive to the mansion in Lincoln Park just to see how long it took to get there from her ratty apartment on the Near West Side, knowing that tomorrow she would have to account for traffic as well.

But she had known, deep down, that she wanted to see the gala event of the season and imagine herself taking part, instead of standing on the sidelines, asking questions about the event—for, of all things, the Life and Style page (which her editor snidely called “the society page”).

She hated Life and Style work. But, she reminded herself, unlike her colleagues from Northwestern, she had gotten a paying job as a reporter at the Chicago Courier, one of the few remaining big dailies in the nation, and she’d been promised that she could keep the job if she outperformed every other new hire from that summer.

Outperforming meant taking the humiliating work along with the good stories. Not that any good stories had come her way yet. She was too young and too new.

She was covering stupid stuff—high-end engagement parties, routine political speeches, and (her least favorite) the county fair. Often, she was doing background for one of the “real” reporters, or helping them post their articles on the paper’s brand-new website.

She hadn’t expected this. She had awards and credentials. She had written for major newspapers (with the prodding help of her professors), and she had interned at one of the most prestigious papers in the country—for no money, of course. She’d actually had to pay the university tuition for the privilege of interning, because the position provided “experience” and “enhanced her résumé” while infusing her with more cynicism than a woman of twenty-four should probably have.

She sighed. She wished, just once, she had some money and respect. She knew that the very rich people waltzing inside that mansion weren’t the stuff of fairy tales, but she liked to imagine they were. The Rich—different from everyone else, if she were to believe F. Scott Fitzgerald. She liked to believe they not only had better clothes and more financial opportunities, but also perfect lives.

She’d never had a perfect life. She’d been so poor that she hadn’t known where her next meal would come from. Not a lot of Northwestern freshman had homeless parents and full scholarships. She’d kept that secret, even from her best friends at school.

College had been a luxury for her, and her experiences growing up had enabled her to survive that disastrous internship without going either hungry or bankrupt.

She’d even freelanced. That had made her so much more money than her stupid job was earning her right now. Maybe she should give up the steady paycheck and strike out on her own....

“Aren’t you cold?”

The male voice from behind her made her jump. Her heart rate increased a thousandfold, but she tried to pretend she wasn’t alarmed as she turned to see who spoke.

A tall, blond man stood behind her. He was about her age, with flawless skin—the type she would have killed for—just starting to pink up from the chill, a square jaw, and blue eyes so electric they seemed lit from within.

Men this handsome didn’t just lurk behind shrubbery. Particularly men this handsome who were also wearing a tux as if they’d been born to it.

The white scarf wrapped around his neck appeared to be his only concession to the weather. He had his hands in the pockets of his tux trousers, but he didn’t look cold.

She wondered if he was drunk.

“I feel like I should be offering you my parka,” she said. “Isn’t that the chivalrous thing to do?”

He shrugged one broad shoulder. “The chill feels good. It’s stuffy inside.”

“It’ll feel good for a few minutes,” she said. “And then you’re going to regret you ever stepped out here.”

“And regret that I joined you to spy on the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?” He didn’t sound sarcastic, but in her mind, she could hear Robin Leach’s smarmy voice blaring the words. She hadn’t thought of that show since she was a kid. Even then, it had been a guilty pleasure.

Her cheeks heated. She’d been caught.

She decided not to lie. “It looks pretty in there.”

“Oh,” he said. “It is pretty, in a soulless, let’s-make-this-the-most-stunning-room-in-the-world sort of way.”

As if she knew what that was. She’d like to experience it, just once.

“You don’t like it,” she said, both as a question and a statement.

He shrugged again, his blue eyes looking past her. He was taller than she was. He could probably see inside so much better than she could.

“I’ve always liked that saying, ‘Home is where the heart is,’” he said.

Something about the way he spoke the cliché caught her ear. She’d been concentrating so hard on not looking startled by him that she hadn’t noticed, until now, that he had one of those indefinable European accents. An English-is-my-second-language-and-I-speak-it-better-than-you accent.

“You’d better go back inside before you freeze,” she said.

He smiled faintly and looked at the windows. Their light reflected in his magnificent eyes.

“I’m not sure I’m going back in,” he said.

She frowned. “Why not?”

He shrugged again. “I have a hunch,” he said softly, “I’m about to run away.”

2

RAINE’S BREATH CAUGHT. People usually weren’t that honest with her, especially when they had just met her. But she wasn’t even sure he meant that comment for her.

He was still looking inside the mansion, as if measuring each movement.

“Run away?” Raine asked. “From what?”

“The pretension,” he said, almost as if he wasn’t talking to her. “The expectations.”

Her inner reporter finally woke up. “What expectations?”

He blinked as if he were surprised that she was standing beside him. He smiled, faintly, dismissively, and the lost expression left his face.

He shrugged a third time.

“I take it they didn’t let you in because of their rather stringent dress code?” he said.

“They didn’t let me in because I wasn’t invited,” she said with a bit more bite than she expected. “Think of me as the Little Match Girl.”

“I should hope not,” he said. “She died at the end of that sadly misnamed Christmas story.”

Raine’s cheeks heated even more. She had forgotten the story’s details. She’d only remembered the little match girl of the title, standing on a street corner, watching everyone else go about their business and ignoring her.

“Look,” Raine said, “you have to get inside somewhere or you’ll be the one who dies of hypothermia. And I don’t have any matches to keep you warm.”

He smiled. This time, the smile was real. It lit up his face. “I have a hereditary tolerance for the cold.”

“And I have leaky boots,” Raine said. “I also have a car, if you would like to go back to your hotel and get a coat or more comfortable clothes or something.”

“I don’t….” He stopped himself, then nodded. “A car it is. We’ll stop somewhere to get you new boots and me something that makes me look like a twenty-first century creation instead of someone who stepped out of a Victorian Christmas party.”

She smiled for the first time. He did look like the leading man in one of those black-and-white sketches from the pages of ancient newspapers. The actual society pages, back when there was some kind of society to look down its nose at everyone else.

Now, their descendants just danced in their finery and never thought of the sad impoverished souls standing outside.

Too cynical, girl, she thought to herself. Don’t say that stuff out loud.

“I don’t need new boots,” she lied, “but I’ll drive you wherever you need to go.”

“‘Need,’” he repeated. “Fascinating concept when applied to escape.”

“I thought you said you were running away, not escaping.”

He looked at her, then shrugged. He seemed to shrug a lot. She wondered if he had developed his rather eloquent shrug language to avoid saying what he really thought.

“I think I need to experience Chicago during the holiday season the way the people really experience it, not….” He waved his hand toward that mansion, as if she understood exactly what he meant.

She didn’t, not really. She wondered if the hand-waving gesture was like the shrug, something that allowed the listener to fill in the blanks so that the speaker was off the hook.

“And,” he added, “if your boots are leaking, you do need new ones.”

“Yeah, well,” she said. “Need and afford are two different things.”

He started, as if she had surprised him.

Her cheeks had grown so warm, she could probably qualify as her own heat source. He could put his hands on them and not need mittens. But she didn’t say that.

She’d probably said too much already.

“Seriously,” she said, “I’ll drive you where you want to go, but you have to tell me where that is.”

He nodded, then glanced over the shrubs. Then his gaze came back to hers. “I’d like to stop and buy presentable clothing. And I’d like to treat you to dinner.”

She almost said that there were places in the city where tuxes were considered appropriate attire. But she didn’t, because those places were so expensive she could pay half her bills with the cost of an entrée.

“You’re determined to get out of here, aren’t you?” she said. “I suppose your regular clothes are inside?”

It had taken her a few minutes to figure that out. Sometimes she was slow, but she eventually caught on.

He glanced at her, frowned just a little, and then smiled—that smooth, not-quite-there smile. “Um. Yes.”

She got the sense that he hadn’t quite lied to her, but he hadn’t told her the truth, either.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go to the car.”

And, she thought, get this very strange evening underway.

3

SHE HAD PARKED almost two blocks away because she’d been worried that there would be a guardhouse or security or something.

She suspected that if she had gone past the shrubbery, she would have discovered how intense the security really was. She had initially thought she would show up on some security camera somewhere, and they would watch her, maybe send someone out to get rid of her.

But now that she’d met this guy—whom she really hadn’t met at all, just talked to—she was beginning to wonder if there was any security outside of the sculptured part of the lawn.

She trudged through the snow, past the other gigantic lawns and smaller mansions that lined this part of Lincoln Park. She’d parked just at the edge of this ridiculously expensive part of the city, where the less fabulously wealthy had condos or penthouse apartments instead of actual brick-and-stone buildings surrounded by perfectly coiffed snowdrifts.

The man walked beside her, head up, staring at the neighborhood as if he hadn’t seen it before. She wondered at herself. Usually, she didn’t pick up stray men and offer to take them somewhere in her car. Especially if she found them lurking in shrubbery.

Had she decided he was trustworthy because he wore a tuxedo or because he was the most handsome man she had ever met or because he just seemed honorable?

She had turned down dates with men she’d spent a lot of time with because she felt that she hadn’t known them. And now she was doing this.

Then she shrugged—at least mentally—and continued forward. If nothing else, she might be able to get background for the story she had to write for the Life and Style section.

She rounded a corner, and there it was—her faithful steed, the car she’d managed to purchase from her old college roommate, Verity. Raine had known it was a pity sale. Verity couldn’t believe anyone could survive without a car, and had wanted to give Raine the car when her parents gave her the next year’s model. But Raine couldn’t stomach a free car, no matter how nice the gesture. So she had given Verity half of her savings—all $500 of it.

Verity, bless her, had signed a bill of sale, transferred the title, and said nothing. Then, anyway. She did later say (repeatedly) that Raine could borrow the money back at any time without interest or a payment schedule.

Some people, especially those who grew up in privilege, did not understand the importance of paying your own way.

But Verity’s generosity did mean that the car Raine led this man to wasn’t a total rust bucket. In fact, the car was only three years old and had more amenities than Raine’s apartment.

She wrapped her hand around the key fob but didn’t unlock the car. Even though she (weirdly) trusted this guy, she wasn’t going to unlock the car without a bit of information.

“Before I drive you wherever,” she said, “you have to do one thing.”

The man looked at her, tilting his head as if silently commanding her to continue. That communicating-without-talking thing that he did was both intriguing and irritating.

She wondered how that habit had developed.

“You have to tell me who you are,” she said.

He stopped and jerked slightly, as if she had hit him with a mild Taser shot. He glanced back in the direction they had come, as if weighing her question.

“I’m Raine Wilkins,” she said, and extended her mittened hand.

He relaxed visibly. He had apparently misunderstood her question. Had he thought she was asking for his résumé? His bank balance? His lineage?

He took her mitten in his bare hand. His skin hadn’t yet turned red with the cold. She could feel the firmness of his grip through the wool.

“I’m Niko,” he said, and that word had even more of an accent than anything else he had spoken. “N-N-North. Niko North.”

The stammer was a surprise. And again, she had the sense of not-quite-a-lie coming from him. Or maybe she was losing that sense of trust, just a little.

They didn’t really shake hands. They just held each other’s fingers and looked in each other’s eyes for a moment before she let go. Her heart started to flutter. She willed it to stop. That pitter-patter thing did not belong in this moment. She needed to keep her wits about her.

“And you’re not from Chicago,” she said.

“Is it that obvious?” he asked.

“I figured when you wanted to see how Chicago’s other half lived, you weren’t from the city. All the halves mingle here, whether we want to or not.” She stepped over a pile of snow a plow had pushed against the curb and used the fob to unlock the car.

It chirruped at her, a friendly sound that she often thought of as a Hello! Welcome back. She had never told anyone that either, not even Verity, who saw cars as possessions, not as sanctuaries (or possible places to live if things really got bad).

“I unlocked your side too,” she said to Niko.

He nodded, pulling the door open and sliding inside. She got in as well.

The interior smelled of leather and coffee. She kept the car, in Verity’s words, “disturbingly neat.” Raine had detailed it after she bought it, and she kept it clean and ready for any emergency. Except for the day’s coffee cup, which always sat in its little cup holder on the driver’s side, the car had no garbage in it at all.

“What sort of vehicle is this?” Niko asked, running his hand along the dashboard.

How to answer that? It was a Lexus, which Verity had thought too “old” for a woman in her twenties, so the next car she got was some kind of sports car. Verity’s father didn’t want to give a leased car to a twenty-something, so he bought Verity’s cars outright. Which meant Raine owned this thing, which had initially cost about $50,000 new. The insurance cost her more than the car had.

“Um,” Raine said, “it’s a sedan.”

She hoped she hadn’t insulted him. Guys usually wanted to know about car makes and models, but guys like that would ask a slightly different question, like, “What kind of Lexus is this?” rather than what kind of “vehicle” it was.

“Hmm,” he said, touching the dash and then the leather seats. “It is astoundingly comfortable.”

As if sedans couldn’t be comfortable? Lexus’s couldn’t be comfortable? Cars couldn’t be comfortable?

She let out a small breath, and turned the ignition. The car hummed to life. He watched her every move as if he hadn’t seen anything like it before.

Maybe he watched everything like that, with a cool fascination that made it seem important.

And maybe she was overthinking this.

“You want clothes, right?”

He nodded.

She didn’t ask where he wanted to go to shop. He had said he wanted to go downtown, so she took that to mean the Magnificent Mile. After all, he had been inside a Lincoln Park mansion and he was wearing an expensive tux.

The traffic was pretty light. It took less than fifteen minutes to get to the parking garage closest to Bloomingdale’s. They didn’t talk much along the way. He asked a few questions about Lake Michigan in the winter, and she answered them with the surety of a tour guide.

He kept his face turned toward the passenger window, watching the scenery go by as if he had never noticed it before.

She had chosen Bloomingdale’s flagship store because she figured he could get everything he needed in a department store, and he wouldn’t have to be outside long. In spite of herself, she was worried about him.

They got out of the car. She led him to the entrance. She said, “Just look at the signage for the men’s department. I’ll wait for you on the ground level in the coffee bar.”

“You’re not coming with me?” he asked, sounding vaguely lost.

Okay, she thought that was totally strange. She didn’t want to see a man she didn’t know well try on outfits. She wondered if he wanted her to pay for his clothing too.

She shrugged, hoping it was as elegant as his shrugs had been. “I got a bit of a chill. I need something warm. I’ll wait for you there.”

If he didn’t have money, he would say so now. Or he would back out of this whole thing.

Or she could back out if he got weird.

She waited.

Instead, he smiled ruefully. “Ground level it is. I’ll try not to take too long.”

And he walked away from her into the bright store, all decorated for the holidays. He looked like a model, someone who had arrived at the store to pose for one of the high-end holiday ads—the kind that try to encourage rich people to give their friends and families cars wrapped in giant bows.

She watched until he disappeared behind a gigantic Christmas tree covered with white fairy lights and lots of Bloomingdales’ ornaments. Then she took the escalator to the lowest level and walked into one of the more expensive coffee bars in all of Chicago. She was probably spending what she normally would have spent on lunch just for a cup, but she really did need the warmth.

The coffee bar smelled of freshly ground beans. Several shoppers sat at tables, leaning into each other and conversing softly over tasteful piano jazz versions of Christmas carols.

She ordered a cup of holiday mocha, pulled off her mittens, and stuck them into the pockets of her parka. Places like this always made her self conscious about her clothing. Her feet were cold and soaked inside her leaky boots, her parka had never been in style, and her mittens had been hand-knitted by her mom. At least she hadn’t been wearing the matching hat, although her short bob was probably messed up from the wind.

Here, it wasn’t fun watching rich people enjoy themselves, probably because they could see her spying on them and knew at a glance just how out of place she was. Here, she felt like her homeless teenage self, sneaking inside a place she didn’t belong just for a bit of warmth.

She sipped at her drink, but mostly used the ceramic mug to warm her hands. As she warmed up, she slipped off the parka, revealing the bulky, hand-me-down sweater she usually wore on days she didn’t plan to see anyone.

And of course, she was now shopping with the most handsome man she had ever met, a man who looked stunning in a tux, a man who had taken one look at her and decided to cast her in the best-friend role in a buddy comedy. She wasn’t sure why that made her feel sad. She wasn’t interested in him, was she? A man who was running away from a party, who hadn’t really said much to her as she ferried him to his destination?

He hadn’t even apologized for taking her time. The fact that she was annoyed about that one fact would have made her college friends from out of state laugh at her.

Overzealous apologizers, Verity had called Midwesterners. If you don’t start with an apology, you’re considered rude.

Raine’s cheeks heated at the memory. Her blush response was getting a big workout today. She smiled to herself. Verity had been right: the default apology actually meant something to Raine.

The fact that Niko North hadn’t done it was yet more confirmation that he was Not From Here.

“There you are.”

She looked up from her steaming mug.

Niko was standing beside her. She hadn’t seen him enter the coffee bar.

She had thought he looked good in a tux, but he looked even better now. He was wearing a pale blue, cable knit sweater that showed off his broad shoulders and flat stomach. He had tucked a pair of blue jeans into brown work boots. He had a heavy black coat draped over his shoulders. In his left hand, he held paper shopping bags with Bloomie’s special holiday logo emblazoned on them. They probably held his tux and shoes.

With his right hand, he set down a beautifully wrapped package in front of her. The wrapping was white, decorated with a sparkly gold ribbon tied in a magnificent bow.

The box was huge. It looked like one of the fake presents under the Christmas trees decorating every floor of this mall.

She swallowed. Verity would still laugh. The Politeness Dilemma, she would call it. How do you say no to a kindness without insulting the kind person? Verity would’ve been blunt, but blunt wasn’t coming to mind for Raine.

“I—um—what’s that?” She suddenly hoped she had made an incorrect assumption. She hoped he wasn’t giving her anything. She hoped he had bought a holiday gift for a friend or family member while he was here, and had simply set it on the small table in front of her.

The snobby rich people around her were watching surreptitiously from their tables. The conversations had trailed off, except for a pair of businessmen in the corner, discussing the day’s latest stock reports.

“I wanted to get you something for your trouble,” Niko said.

That blush that never entirely faded warmed her entire face. At least she wasn’t cold anymore (except her feet. She wouldn’t be able to warm up her feet until she got home).

She weighed her possible responses.

You didn’t have to was Midwestern for Thank you so much. You surprised me!

I can’t accept this was rude.

Thank you meant I’m thrilled.

So, she blurted, “It’s been no trouble.”

Even though it had been a little. She had gone out of her way to bring him here, and it had cost a parking fee and the stupid holiday drink, which she wasn’t going to finish.

Niko smiled softly. The change of clothing made him look younger, more accessible, like an actual person instead of a male model. Plus, his blond hair was slightly mussed from pulling the sweater over his head, and it gave him a just-out-of-bed tousled look.

Her breath caught. So she was interested. Which was wrong in so many ways.

He glanced at the package, then back at her. He seemed amused instead of offended.

“My family specializes in gifts,” he said. “We always give gifts, generally to people who never give us anything. It feels so good for me to give you something in return for your time. Please, let me do what my family does.”

How could she say no to that? This was turning into the strangest few hours of her life.

She gave him a weak smile. “Okay,” she said, and in that wobbly word, she could hear every doubt she’d ever had about him. He probably could too.

He set the bags down and pulled up the chair opposite her. He put his chin on his palm, tilted his head, and watched her fumble with the present.

It was bulky and a little heavy. She leaned back, and set her mug on the newly emptied table behind her, so she wouldn’t spill liquid on the present.

“It’s too pretty to unwrap,” she said, hoping she would get a reprieve. She could open this at home, or figure out a way to stuff the present back into one of the bags. (Okay, that was rude, too. She would never do that, either. She was rather appalled that the thought had even crossed her mind.)

“Presents are always about the possibilities, aren’t they?” he asked. “When they’re wrapped, they can be anything.”

Or nothing, she thought. She’d opened too many presents at the homeless shelters that had vouchers inside. She would rather have had the voucher directly, or in an envelope, than suffer through the anticipation of a present.

“But do open it,” he said gently. “The wrapping is a lot less important than what’s inside.”

Her stomach clenched. Was he transforming into creepy stalker guy, doing inappropriate things just because she was nice to him?

The entire shop had gone quiet. She gave him her most brilliant smile (which felt totally fake) and then slid the present toward her.

She carefully untied the ribbon and draped it over one of the empty chairs. If she were honest with herself, that ribbon was too pretty to crumple up and waste on a five-minute package wrap.

She would take the ribbon and the wrapping to her parents’ small apartment, the place they lived now that they had gotten back on their feet. Her parents still saved the tiniest things.

She willed thoughts of her family out of her mind as she slipped her finger under one of the pieces of tape and released the side of the wrapping. She loosened the rest of it to reveal a large, solid, cardboard box inside. She couldn’t read the manufacturer’s name—she had opened it from the wrong side.

The blood had left her face for the very first time in hours as she caught an inkling of what might be inside. She hoped that the clerk or the temp employee or whoever had wrapped this lovely present had just used a discarded box, maybe one from Niko’s personal buying spree.

The box was for boots.

She unwrapped just a bit more, then slipped the box out of the wrapping, setting the paper on the seat of that empty chair. She peeled back the box’s lid to reveal expensive waterproof boots that went up to mid-calf.

“I couldn’t…” she started, then realized just how rude she was sounding. But she really couldn’t. It was an outrageously expensive gift, especially from someone she had just met.

“I guessed at the size,” Niko said, “but since we’re here, we can just go up and exchange them if they don’t fit.”

“I can’t…”

“You said your boots leak,” he said. “That’s just not acceptable.”

It wasn’t acceptable, but she couldn’t afford boots—especially not boots like this. Despite herself, she ran her hands over them. She could feel the waterproofing, the thickness of the exterior, the warm fake fur inside.

She wanted these. She wanted them more than she could say. They were perfect—and they were in her size.

“We just met,” she said so softly that, for a moment, she wondered if she had spoken aloud.

Niko let his hand drop away from his chin and sat up just a little. Then he added one of those eloquent shrugs. “I know. I acted on my culture’s customs, not yours. I did not mean to alarm you.”

His accent was a little stronger than it had been earlier. She wondered if that was deliberate.

“If I have upset you—”

“No,” she lied. What was wrong with her? He had been generous. And no one had ever done anything like this for her before. Was it normal among the rich? Was it charity? Or was it something else? “You didn’t upset me.”

His gaze hadn’t left hers. It felt like he could see inside of her, like he could see the lie.

There was no good way to say no to the boots. Except “no,” Verity would have said. And honestly, Raine didn’t want to refuse the boots. She’d had her leaky pair for two years. She often lined them with garbage bags, but she had forgotten to do that this morning.

She started, “It’s just that no one has ever—” and before she could finish, he was on his feet, and walking toward the counter of the coffee bar.

She felt disoriented. The fact that he left was even stranger than the gift.

“—done anything like this for me before,” she finished.

Although she wondered if that were true. Verity had essentially given her a car. But it had been a car that Verity—whose parents were filthy rich—would have either sold or traded in or abandoned in her second parking space.

Niko had bought Raine a gift—a thoughtful gift—on the basis of an hour’s acquaintance.

She moved the boots to the seat of the empty chair and stared at them. She felt off-balance.

Niko returned, carrying a steaming mug.

“Sorry,” he said, and for a very brief half second, she thought he was apologizing for the gift.

The overzealous apologizer in her felt satisfied with that, but another part of her felt disappointed. She didn’t want him to apologize, not deep down. She realized she liked the gift, the special treatment.

Jeez, she was being weird. She simply did not know how to handle this at all.

She was fretting so hard she almost missed the rest of what he was saying. “I didn’t mean to walk away, but that thing you were drinking looked so good that I just had to get one.”

Before he sat down again, he grabbed her drink and put it back on the table. He glanced at the boots, and she wondered if he was going to comment on where she had set them. She hadn’t even tried them on.

“I’m getting hungry,” he said. “Is there somewhere around here where we can have a good dinner?”

Her expression must have changed for a very brief moment, because he frowned just a bit.

“Dinner had been part of the bargain for you bringing me down here,” he said. “I offered to treat, if you’ll recall.”

“But with these boots…” she said.

His gaze slipped away from hers. “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

And she was making a bigger deal out of it than he was, apparently.

She felt stupid, but also odd. The boots had made her realize the risk she had taken driving him down here. He seemed nice—he seemed nicer than nice. He seemed too nice, if there were such a thing.

Maybe it was her problem (hell, it was her problem), but she’d read too many detective stories, watched too many true crime programs on television, and listened to stories from too many women she’d interviewed for the serious news stories she’d done before she got her “real” job.

Stalkers often started this way. They were too attentive right from the beginning. They found women like her, women who had had too many hard knocks, and then they treated that woman like gold. The problem was, they wouldn’t leave her alone, even if she wanted to be left alone.

And instead of meeting Niko when she was at her work or even at her best, she had met him when she’d been peering at a party in a mansion, like a little kid who’d been forbidden to mingle with the grown-ups.

“I’m…afraid I’m going to pass on dinner.” Raine just couldn’t handle it. Yes, he was gorgeous. Yes, he was nice. And yes, he was odd. She was too cautious—too paranoid—to deal with odd.

(Or maybe she was too screwed up to deal with nice. She had to examine that as well—later, when he wasn’t staring at her with those intense blue eyes.)

A tiny frown appeared just above his nose, adding to his attractiveness, weirdly enough. He didn’t understand.

She didn’t expect him to. She wasn’t going to explain herself. They had just met, and things had gotten weird, and she—

Oh, heck, they’d started weird. I’m about to run away. What was that all about?

“I’ll drive you anywhere you want,” she said, “but I’m not comfortable with…”

She was going to finish with the word “you,” which was half a lie, because she was comfortable with him—at least her body was. She leaned toward him, she thought he was attractive, she liked him.

But her brain and her survival instincts wouldn’t let her go any farther. Too many red flags. And she didn’t want to say that, because he’d bought her the boots. Because she found him attractive. Because she had the sense that he was nice.

“It’s all right.” He put his hand over hers. His fingers were warm and strong. “I understand.”

Yet he said it in one of those tones that implied he didn’t understand at all. Not that she blamed him. She wasn’t sure she understood all of it either.

Just like she didn’t understand why she wasn’t pulling her hand away. She was sending mixed messages, and she felt vaguely guilty about that.

He took his hand off hers a half a second before she pulled away.

“And,” he said, that accent still strong. “It’s all right. You do not have to drive me. I will take a cab.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I do,” he said. “I have made you uncomfortable. For that I am sorry. We do not really know each other, do we, and I presumed.”

He inclined his head. The apology was there, and it was almost enough to get her to change her mind. She would have too, if there weren’t butterflies gathering in her stomach.

“Thank you,” she said, and stood. She wasn’t certain if she was thanking him for being understanding, or thanking him for the boots, or thanking him as a reflexive gesture—the flip side of that Midwestern politeness: if in doubt (and I’m sorry isn’t appropriate) say Thank you.

She stood, folded the wrapping paper and ribbon and placed them inside the boot box, and then slipped on her coat. She gathered the box against her chest.

“It was really nice to meet you,” she said lamely.

His smile was sad. There were no eloquent shrugs to go with it. “It was nice to meet you as well.”

She turned away before she could change her mind, and hurried out of the coffee bar. For a brief moment, she toyed with going back inside and trying to explain herself, but she didn’t.

She rode the escalator up to the level where she had come in, wondering if she should return the boots and tell the clerks to refund his credit card. That would be the smart thing.

But she needed boots, and she had almost no money, and she decided that she could suck up her pride for this one thing, even though it felt odd.

Although she knew she would think of him every time she put on the boots, and she would wonder if she’d handled this entire situation correctly.

Maybe someday, she might even know the answer.

4

THE NEXT MORNING, she drove back to Lincoln Park. The press conference was being held in the reception room of the large mansion she had spied on the night before.

The mansion was open to the public in the holiday season, just so that the unwashed could see what kind of decorations someone with money could slather all over a ten thousand square foot home. Raine had gone once, years ago, with her college friends, who’d oooed and ahhhed over each little bauble.

She hadn’t oooed or ahhhed. She had walked through in thin-lipped silence, noting how much clothing (or food) each doodad could have bought for children like the one she had once been.

She had a hunch she would be even less happy to be here this morning. In addition to the expensive doodad Christmas show, the press conference was bogus make-work, just like most press conferences she attended for the Life and Style section. This press conference was being held by an international conglomerate with the cutesy name of Claus & Company. Some corporate bigwig was making an announcement about Claus & Company’s new gift-giving program for people in need.

She had been to so many of these things that she had tuned out before she had even arrived. She had to pay attention, at least a little, because the only way she could write a story different from every other low-level reporter’s was to find an angle all her own.

And it couldn’t be the new angle presented at the conference, because TV reporters would be here too. Mansions like this one, all decorated for the holidays, and press conferences from corporations like Claus & Company made for great evening news visuals. The reporters who had a brain would often pull the one new thing from the half-hour-long conference, and blare it on every half hour iteration of their newscast.

If she wrote the same thing as the evening news blare, the morning paper would look like a repeat of whatever it was that the local stations had covered the night before.

And her editor would be very, very unhappy.

He had already rejected the first angle she had proposed: How the holiday gifts for needy children never went far enough—how those kids needed the basics year-round, not just at the holidays.

Hey, Scrooge McDuck, he said to her. That’s also an evergreen story. We all know impoverished kids lack everything. We run that story sometime in the middle of December. But events like this one are happy-feely stories that put the smile in the holiday season.

She didn’t feel like smiling. She felt grumpy. She hoped an angle would suggest itself once the stupid press conference was over.

She parked on the grounds of the mansion this time—there was no real security now, and there wasn’t a glut of cars. Even though the sun was out, creating slush where there had been snow and ice the night before, her feet were dry because she wore the boots Niko had bought her.

They fit perfectly, almost as if they had been made for her. She had never had boots (or even shoes) that fit so well. The interiors were warm and soft, and her feet felt good inside them.

And true to the realization she’d had as she left the coffee bar, she thought of Niko as she pulled the boots out of the box.

She half-hoped he had run away like he said he would. She didn’t want to see him. She was vaguely embarrassed by her behavior the night before, even though, if she were presented with the same circumstance right at this very moment, she would respond in the exact same way.

That didn’t block the guilt she was feeling at keeping the boots—and at treating him like he had done something sneaky, when he was probably just being kind.

It was the “probably” that concerned her.

So it would be best if he weren’t here. If he was, she would simply ignore him.

Although she hadn’t ignored him even in her own mind. She thought of him long before she put the boots on. She thought of him when she dressed in her pale pink work sweater (sparkly and trim), black pants that would tuck into the boots and accent her legs, and her very best coat, the one that made her look like she had stepped out of some 1940s holiday movie.

She walked up the stairs to the double oak doors, which stood open. She double-checked, like she always did before walking into a press conference, to make sure she had her microcassette recorder as well as the notebook she always used to scrawl bits of information.

Because this conference had been designed with TV people in mind, a well-dressed flunky greeted her at the door and took her coat, handing her a ticket and telling her the coat check was gratis. Raine had done this enough to know it was also required, so that everyone, even the print reporters, looked good on camera.

She watched her coat disappear into the bowels of a huge closet and then she walked past two large Scotch pines. Their fresh scent made her think of Christmas. Despite her holiday history, she always found that scent to be full of hope.

White and gold-gilded signs on brass floor stands pointed the way to the press conference. She had to thread past several portraits of people she did not know, evergreen boughs looping over everything, and an antique grandfather clock that was probably worth more than the building she lived in.

By the time she reached the large hall where someone had set up a stage with a podium, she was already sick of the holiday excess. She wanted to turn around and leave, but knew she didn’t dare. Two doors, behind the podium, were closed. A worker had just finished putting up a backdrop with the tasteful Santa logo of Claus & Company (which suggested but didn’t copy the Coca-Cola Santa of fifty years ago). About fifty chairs stood near the stage, some with reporters already seated in them.

She passed a table laden with a dozen different kind of Christmas cookies, some candied fruit, sliced quick breads, and finger sandwiches. Behind the food, beautiful silver urns sparkled, labeled coffee, decaf, tea, and water. This spread didn’t have the usual bottled waters and soft drinks visible on the table. She suspected that they weren’t being provided because they weren’t attractive and because they were a little bit déclassé.

Then she shook her head at her own thoughts. She was snobby in the reverse. The mansion itself put her on edge. Maybe that was why she had been so cold to Niko the night before; she had been deeply uncomfortable. There were two parts to her: the part that envied every single person who had danced in the mansion the night before, and the part that thought those people were heartless souls who did nothing of value to help others in need.

Oh, she was in quite a mood going into this press conference.

Before she found a chair, she walked up to the podium and put her voice-activated recorder on it. When she was in college, she’d always had to search for her recorder at the end of a press conference. The reporters from the “big” newspapers would continually move her recorder farther and farther away.

Now, her recorder was labeled with the Courier’s name, and no one dared touch it. She always arrived a little early so that no one would know that the Courier had sent a fresh-faced cub, who looked more inexperienced than everyone else in the room.

She chose a chair in the back, partly because she was grumpy, and partly because she knew better than to fight with the TV people for the plum seats.

Some flunky had placed a folder on every chair. The folder contained a press release inside, along with some still photos of Claus & Company’s headquarters, Christmas trees with piles of gifts beneath the lowest branches, and some headshots of corporate staffers that she didn’t bother to look at.

Other reporters were filing in. The TV people were already setting up, adding their mikes to the taped pile of mikes on the podium, and finding a place to stand that wouldn’t block the camera angles of their competitors.

Raine pulled out her notebook and pretended to be writing about the ambience as the rest of the reporters found their seats. Around her, everyone complained softly about the lack of bottled water and the worthless nature of the press conference.

Precisely at 11:00 a.m., a nervous little woman wearing a red-and-green suit bounded up the two steps leading to the temporary stage. She stepped behind the podium, but only the top of her head was visible over it. So she stepped to one side, making every reporter on the opposite side of the podium groan a little. They couldn’t see her anymore.

The camera operators, standing in the back, shifted as a unit, but without a lot of energy. Everyone knew that the people who introduced usually didn’t provide the important information in the press conference (if there was important information, which Raine doubted there would be).

The woman had bright green eyes, and a pointed chin that made her face seem quite narrow. She tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear, then turned to see someone just outside of Raine’s line of vision. Raine stared at the ear. How did they find someone with tastefully pointed ears to introduce the press conference’s Important Personage?

Obviously, no one at Claus & Company was leaving this press conference to chance.

“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen,” said the woman in a voice as tiny as she was.

Or perhaps the folks at Claus & Company liked visuals better than anything, since the little woman’s voice was getting softer as she spoke. She looked like an elf, and while that would play well on television, it didn’t help everyone else in the room.

“Use the mike!” one of the radio reporters yelled.

The woman beside Raine muttered, “Don’t bother,” as if she were talking to the radio guy, even though he was two rows up.

That little kerfuffle made Raine miss most of what the tiny woman said. Her voice got lost in the shuffling and the muttering. Her face had turned as red as Raine’s had the night before. The little woman looked terrified.

She glanced to the side again, and then said something inaudible, and extended her hand to one side.

The TV reporters in the front row sat at attention. Apparently, the little woman had finished her introduction. She looked at the reporters as if surprised that they hadn’t applauded.

Raine actually felt sorry for her, and wanted to tell her that reporters only applauded for the president of the United States, and then, only out of politeness (and fear) when they were inside the White House briefing room.

A man walked out of one of the doors in the back. He wore a chambray shirt and dark blue jeans, along with tennis shoes. Raine expected him to adjust the microphone or move the podium. Instead, he stood behind it.

Her breath caught. It was Niko.

He looked older and more polished. The comfortable jeans and shirt gave him an authority that the tuxedo hadn’t.

Some of the TV people frowned, craning their necks to look for the person who had just been introduced. In Chicago, no one who spoke at a high-level press conference ever dressed in jeans. Suits, ties, maybe shirtsleeves in the deepest, hottest summer, but never looking like he had just set down a wrench in the back room to come out and make a point.

Niko smiled softly as he watched them. He knew what they were looking for, and he knew they didn’t see it in him.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, without leaning into the mike. His rich voice was perfectly suited for speaking to a crowd.

Raine felt a shiver run through her. She wanted to bend her head over the notepad she had brought, but she also didn’t want to look away from him. She wasn’t sure why he looked better every single time she saw him, but he did. Which meant she had to be really careful when she dealt with him.

“Every year,” he was saying, “Claus & Company sponsors charity events in major cities around the world. For the past decade or more, these events have been managed through our charitable arm. In that, this year is no different. What is different—as should seem evident to all of you who are still looking for the Niko North that Falda introduced—is me.”

The heads of the reporters who had still been looking past him snapped into place. A few of the cameras moved sharply toward him as well.

His smile remained, but his eyes twinkled.

Raine frowned. That twinkle almost seemed like something fake, as if it had been produced by a flare of light behind him or an effect someone had designed on the podium.

No one’s eyes twinkled like that, not in a way that would be visible several rows back.

He paused for a moment. “Now that you realize I’m the person you’ve come to see, let me explain who I am.”

Raine was gripping the pen as hard as she could. When she realized the pen was bending, she set it down, stretched out her hand, and then picked the pen back up again, all without looking directly at it.

“I am, as Falda said, Niko North. My family has owned Claus & Company for more years than I care to think about, certainly as long as the company has done business inside the United States.”

She let out a small breath. He owned Claus & Company? No wonder he thought the boots were a small token. Their cost represented pocket change to him.

“My father, who is in charge of the company, is beginning to make noises about stepping down. He wants a family member to take his place. Throughout the history of the company, that family member has been the oldest son. My mother has finally convinced my father that’s no way to run a business in this modern era. She believes the business should be run by a family member, but the family member best suited to the business, not the family member who was born first.”

Everyone was staring at him now. A few of the TV reporters had signaled their camera operators to move slightly closer. A couple of print reporters were scrawling as fast as they could.

Raine glanced at what she had written which was only one word. Owns?

She let out a breath. Already this was less of a fluffy press conference than she had expected. She hoped the microcassette recorder was getting most of this, because she had been too busy staring. And processing. And wondering why the hell he had wanted to run away the night before.

“I have five siblings. All older.” Niko tucked his thumbs in the back pockets of his jeans.

Raine realized suddenly that the casualness was a pose, as much of a costume as the one he had worn the night before. He was pretending to be comfortable. His posture said he was being open.

But his posture lied. He was deeply uncomfortable. He was just hiding it well.

“Two brothers, three sisters,” he was saying. “And all of us have received an assignment this holiday season.”

Then he inclined his head to the right, as if someone had contradicted him. His smile became self-deprecating.

“Well, to be accurate,” he said, “we have had assignments during the holiday season throughout our lives. This year, the assignments are large and designed to reveal our strengths and weaknesses.”

The room was silent. Everyone seemed riveted. Raine knew she was.

“Clearly, one of my weaknesses is the ability to prevaricate. I don’t, if I can avoid it. Which is why I am telling you all of this now. It is, believe it or not, an introduction into the remarks the marketing department at Claus & Company has prepared for me. The remarks that I’m sure someone in the back is shaking at me right now, as if I were the most dense person on the planet.”

Then he turned slightly, and grinned to someone off-stage. Everyone else looked too.

Raine couldn’t see anyone, but she didn’t know if that was because of where she sat or because that person remained just inside one of the doors behind the stage.

Niko turned his attention back to the reporters, removed his hands from his pockets, and gripped the podium. The radio journalist one row ahead of Raine winced. That sound would have boomed into every single mike in the place.

“With our corporate mandate comes freedom,” Niko said. “We can run our little fiefdom anyway we want.”

Fiefdom. That was an interesting word. Raine wrote it down.

“I am in charge of Claus & Company’s charitable efforts in the City of Chicago this holiday season. Each of my siblings will handle holiday charities in five other large cities, each in a different country, and each with different holiday traditions. We are allowed to run the charitable efforts any way we see fit. For example, we can continue to follow past procedures.”

His smile softened as he made eye contact with the reporters in the front row. Someone had trained him to speak in front of a crowd, and how to use it for good effect.

“I’m sure,” Niko said, “my father would prefer that approach. One of his favorite sayings is one you’re all familiar with: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Of course, being my father, he would say: If it’s not broken, leave it alone. He is a stickler for rules, even grammatical ones.”

For a moment, Raine saw the man she had seen the night before, the one who felt constricted by the circumstances. Raised among people who followed rules, Niko probably wanted to escape, if only for one evening.

Maybe he had been afraid of what lay ahead. Even though he was trying to put a good face on all of this, he seemed uncomfortable with what he was facing. Or perhaps he was just thinking aloud about the challenge.

She wished she could see the marketing department representative in the back. She had a hunch that person had his face in his hands right about now, silently cursing Niko for causing problems within the “fiefdom.”

Even using that word probably would cause a lot of problems. She smiled, and then leaned back, not wanting him to see her.

“However,” Niko said, “I think Claus & Company is stuck in the past. We’ve been a very successful company for a long time, but a lot of our success came in the middle of the twentieth century, and, quite frankly, we’re coasting.”

She started scrawling. She had to keep this. There were too many sound bites for the TV people. She would be able to write her own piece—maybe an “uneasy lay the crown” kinda thing.

She felt an itch behind her shoulder blades, which she often got when she was considering something she shouldn’t. Niko hadn’t known she was a reporter last night. But they had had an experience together. She was wearing the proof. And she could mention how uncomfortable he had been with the corporate shindig that he was supposed to attend—the one he had run away from.

She could write about that moment. She could mention that he was seen leaving the party, and heading into downtown Chicago. Because he was seen, and not just by her. She was certain clerks at Bloomingdales would remember him as well, especially when he had come in wearing that tux.

Her cheeks heated. What she was considering was journalistically ethical, but personally suspect. He had been kind to her.

But, of course, she had been kind to him as well. She had driven him away from the party in an untraceable way. She had helped him run away, if only for an evening.

“Speaking for me, and me only,” Niko was saying, “our charitable works are the most important part of our business. The charity work doesn’t bring in revenue like the licensing and the endorsements. It’s not as flashy as the movies and the pop-up books. But charity is at the heart of our business. We started with charitable acts, back in the dark ages of our business, and we have continued those acts. I want to change them from a pro forma way that our company behaves to something proactive.”

Raine frowned, and looked up. Her movement must have caught his attention, because their gazes met.

His smile fell away for a moment, and his skin lost its healthy color. He went pale.

She could tell what he was thinking: He had spent the evening with a reporter. She actually saw the edges of fear in his expression.

Then his smile returned and his gaze left hers, seeking out some other reporters’.

“I’m sure all this is too detailed for the average press conference,” Niko said. “I am clearly not the best marketing representative from our company—especially judging by the reaction of the staff in the back.”

He turned toward them again, grinning this time. His hands left the podium and his thumbs returned to his back pockets. A nervous gesture, a tell.

“So, I guess I’ll return to the script.” Then he chuckled. “If actually speaking on script for the first time could be called returning to the script.”

Raine’s mouth had gone dry. That itch in her back was worse than it had been a few minutes ago. He knew, as well as she did, that she could reveal his evening of doubt.

His father sounded like a true stickler for details. That little escape might forever destroy Niko’s chances to head the company.

And Raine held the power in her hands to change the course of Claus & Company. Niko had given that to her, as clearly as he had given her the boots.

“Normally,” Niko was saying, “we hold charitable events like the one last night. We charge money so that patrons of the arts or large donors can have an evening of entertainment in return for their gifts.”

Something in his tone caught her attention again. Was that sarcasm? Did he think as little of those events as she did?

Surely, she had asked the people in charge at her first charitable giving press conference years ago now, donors could just pony up funds for the poor without being rewarded for it. Isn’t giving its own reward?

Ah, the flunky in charge of that press conference had replied, we have an idealist in the back. I do wish the world worked that way, my dear. Unfortunately, it does not.

“We also have large toy drives, sponsored through several of your organizations. Thank you for that support, by the way.” Niko sounded more relaxed as he said all of this, but he was clearly working on a script now. “We work with the food pantry to provide holiday meals, and with a variety of charities to make sure that everyone has warm winter clothing.”

Raine tensed. Had she been a charitable case to him? Someone to provide for? Had she misread the entire interaction?

That wasn’t like her, but then again, she hadn’t had a lot of experience with people who were natural philanthropists, either. She was used to the hard-bitten reporters or the overwhelmed workers in soup kitchens.

“I don’t have trouble with the organizations we work with,” Niko was saying, and then he glanced over his shoulder. Someone was probably going crazy. That sentence was clearly off script once again. He stepped slightly forward, as if trying to get the marketing person out of his range of vision.

Raine kept her pen poised over the page. She had a hunch this was going to be the money quote. And yes, it would probably appear in the evening newscasts, but she didn’t care. She could take room and expand on this.

“My problem,” he said, “is not with what we do. We’re extremely effective at it. We have a great success rate. Fully ninety-five percent of our funding goes directly to those in need.”

Impressive. Even the best charities often spent as much as 25 percent on overhead and expenses. The lights had to stay on, and the people who ran the charities had to feed their families as well. Some charities—particularly those that were science-based—also had to factor in research costs.

“Clearly,” Niko said, “we’re well run. We have great support worldwide. So, I suppose you’re wondering what my issue is, why I’m rambling on about changes.”

Raine’s pen was still poised over the page. She was wondering, and she would wager everyone else in the room was as well. But no one was asking, which was pretty amazing, considering the room was full of reporters.

Niko had them mesmerized.

“My issue is with our mission,” he said.

Someone moaned loudly behind him. Apparently, the person in charge of keeping him on message had finally lost it.

Niko grabbed the podium again. The radio reporters winced a second time.

“Our mission is to make certain everyone has a wonderful holiday season, no matter what their economic status is, no matter what their religion is, and no matter where they live. Obviously, we miss as much as we succeed, but in the last thirty years, we have greatly improved the health and happiness of millions over the holidays.”

Now, Raine was frowning. Much as she complained about holiday-only charities, holiday help was often all the help families in need got, particularly the working poor. She waited for the other shoe—boot—to drop.

“I believe we need to maintain that mission and add to it,” Niko said. “We shouldn’t start the charitable giving anew each November. We should be helping those in need year-round.”

Some of the print reporters started to shift in their seats. She could see hands preparing to shoot up.

“Now, granted,” Niko said, “many of our partner organizations already help year-round. But they don’t have as much success fundraising for other times of the year as they do during the winter holidays.”

He leaned into the mike. The expression on his face was intense.

“I want to put Claus & Company’s muscle behind the fundraising in Chicago year-round. I also want to raise money to set up housing for the poor and co-op grocery shopping in areas without large supermarkets. I have a plan that will begin this year, and will continue throughout the next five years. We need to take our vast resources and—”

“Do you really think it’s wise, Mr. North, to funnel money away from the existing charities?” asked Richard Rancone, one of the TV reporters who specialized in confrontational shows.

“I never said we would funnel money away,” Niko said. “I hadn’t gotten to the funding yet—”

“Because a lot of people rely on those charities,” said Gerda van Halstad, another one of the confrontational reporters. “If you take money out of their mouths—”

“I’m not,” Niko said. “I’m proposing an increase in funding. We’re going to—”

“It sounds like you’re breaking a system that already works,” said another TV reporter, clearly not wanting to be left behind. “You’re—”

“I have materials,” Niko said. “I’ll have one of my assistants pass them out now. I—”

Reporters stood, shouting questions, and Niko’s face turned red. Raine was used the feeding frenzy. She also knew that the misunderstandings often led to better TV and better ratings than accurately covering the news conference.

She also knew that Niko had given the reporters enough to destroy him. If they judiciously cut the speech he’d been giving, it would sound like he was actively taking food out of the mouths of children.

She shot to her feet before she even realized what she was doing.

“Mr. North,” she said in her loudest voice. It cut through the noise. “How much will your new project cost?”

He looked at her with such disappointment that she almost sat down. She wasn’t sure what the cause of the disappointment was. The fact that she had asked that question? The fact that she was a reporter? The fact that it seemed like she had become part of the feeding frenzy? Or all of the above?

“It will cost an extra one hundred million dollars to start,” he said.

“An extra one hundred million dollars,” she said, just so the confrontational TV reporters got the point. “Who is providing the start-up money?”

His features relaxed visibly. He realized she was helping him.

“Claus & Company,” he said. “We have a general charitable giving fund. I received permission to start my vision with a donation from that fund—”

And there he was, getting lost in the details again, details that never made for good sound bites.

“So, Mr. North, you’re telling me that you will not be using any of the money collected for holiday charities to fund the start-up charity, is that correct?”

He swallowed hard. “Yes, Ms. Wilkins.”

She wished he hadn’t said her name. Now she looked like a shill.

“Can you guarantee that, Mr. North?” she asked. “And before you answer, realize that my paper, the Chicago Courier, has a one-hundred-year history of going after fraudulent charitable claims. Our investigative journalism department is the best in the city.”

That last wasn’t for him. It was for everyone else. I might look like a know-nothing reporter, she was telling her colleagues, but I work for the biggest newspaper in Chicago, and they don’t hire slackers.

“I can guarantee that,” Niko said quietly. “My work on this plan predates my family’s new edict. I have hated the holiday-only nature of our charities for years. Children don’t get enough food year-round. They don’t have a place to put their heads in summer as well as in winter. In fact, more children starve in the summer than they do in the winter, because they lose the opportunity to have one good meal per day—lunch at school.”

“I see you’ve done your homework, Mr. North,” Raine said. “But homework is different than a plan.”

He gave her a sideways smile, one she recognized as genuine. “It is indeed, Ms. Wilkins. As you can probably tell, I am not the best spokesman for all of this, and when I went off script, I probably blew any opportunity to sell this to the people of Chicago correctly. So let me be really clear.”

He paused. The other reporters remained quiet, waiting. Raine prayed he would speak in a single sound bite, because if he got too complicated, he would blow his final chance with these people.

“Claus & Company is proud to continue the charitable work we have done every holiday season with our local partners. In addition, we are adding a new year-round charitable arm, which we shall fund-raise for separately. We have chosen the great city of Chicago to begin our year-round pilot program because we believe we can do a tremendous amount of good here.”

Someone had clearly written that. Niko had finally used the script. He had barely stayed within the thirty-second sound bite, but he had managed it.

“If I give one hundred dollars to your charities,” the radio reporter one row up shouted, “how much of that will go this new program?”

Niko stared at Raine for just a moment, as if she could help him answer, then he looked at the radio reporter. “You will be able to designate which charity your hundred dollars goes to. Claus & Company’s Holiday Fund will exist as it always has. To support Claus & Company’s Uplift Fund, you would need to specify that your money goes there.”

Uplift Fund. He hadn’t even mentioned the name until now. No wonder the marketing people in the back were going nuts.

“I get to choose?” Gerda van Halstad asked. She sounded confused.

“What if I want fifty dollars to go to one fund and fifty dollars to go to another?” asked another reporter almost at the same time.

“Isn’t that needlessly complicated?” asked Richard Rancone.

“I’ll answer you first,” Niko said to Rancone. “We need to keep the charitable arms separate because their missions are separate.”

“And you don’t believe in the Holiday Fund’s mission, do you?” asked Rancone.

“I do believe in it,” Niko said with great exasperation. “Didn’t you hear what I said? I just want to add to it. I want us to help people year-round. What’s so hard to understand about that? It’s part of Claus & Company’s mission, and we need to do it right. It’s a pilot program, something that will benefit Chicago.”

“You sound defensive, Mr. North,” said Rancone. “What aren’t you telling us?”

Niko looked at Raine again, as if she were behind the questions. Or maybe because he needed a friendly face.

She shrugged slightly. Niko’s lips tightened in obvious frustration.

“What am I supposed to say to that?” Niko said to the reporter. “You’re trying to create a crisis where there is none. I’m here to help—”

“So you think Chicago can’t handle its own problems?” Van Halstad asked.

A chubby man in a coal-black suit came out of the back. He headed toward the podium.

“I didn’t say that,” Niko said, moving his hands in a what-in-the-world gesture. “I said that we’re starting a new charitable arm—”

The man in the coal-black suit actively pushed Niko aside.

“Thank you, Mr. North,” said the man in the suit. He had the same odd accent Niko had. “I’m Jørgen. I handle North American marketing for Claus & Company. Let me explain what we’re doing here. We let Mr. North handle this press conference because he will be running the charities—”

“Better than he ran the press conference, I hope,” said Rancone with a grin.

Niko put up a finger, as if he wanted Jørgen the marketing director to shut up. Niko leaned toward the mike, but Jørgen blocked him again.

The pretty elf-like woman came up to Niko’s side and tugged on his sleeve. He shook his head. Then she grabbed his arm hard, and pulled him away from the podium.

The TV reporters were gesturing toward their camera operators, making sure that they got this.

Jørgen was trying hard to pretend nothing was happening around him. He smiled sadly, and said, “We wanted you to know that the North family is one hundred percent behind this. As you can tell, Mr. North is not a practiced speaker. He is the most honest man we know. He’s perfect to run the Uplift Fund, because he will deal directly with everyone, just as he has here.”

A group of well-dressed young people appeared. Raine had no idea where they had come from. Maybe they had been waiting in the back. They moved to the edges of the aisles, handing out folders.

Jørgen was speaking loudly. “We are passing out materials on the Uplift Fund. We’re pleased to start this new charitable organization. It’s going to make a large difference here in Chicago, and, after a trial run here, throughout the world.”

Raine took one of the folders and passed the others to the reporter next to her. The folder was green, with a red label marked Uplift Fund. She sighed. Someone should have handed this out with the first folder.

Whoops.

Raine let out another small sigh. This press conference was a disaster. Normally, she would have chuckled, and then turned it into a big joke when she got back to the news room, but she didn’t feel like it this time.

Niko had been unprepared—or unwilling—to do what most PR flaks did, and it had hurt him. It might have hurt his dreams.

She felt bad about that.

She also wasn’t sure what she would do next, either. She had the ability to make the situation worse, score a big coup for her paper, and launch her career out of the Life and Style section.

But Niko’s dream, the ability to put a lot of money behind a year-round charity that might do something for the city, was also important to her.

She slid the new folder behind the other folder. She would spend a little time in the afternoon investigating the plans, and then she would consult with some of the people she knew who advised charitable start-ups and see if they would comment on the record.

That was something she could do that the TV people couldn’t. She could do an in-depth piece. She would hand the in-depth piece to her editor at the same time as the straight coverage of the disaster press conference.

She took more notes and waited for the marketing director to get done so she could retrieve her microcassette recorder.

She realized, as she waited, she already knew what she was going to write.

And it wasn’t going to include yesterday’s adventure.

As handsome as he was, as smooth as he seemed, Niko North lacked social skills. That had been apparent yesterday when he had given her the boots, and it had become even more apparent at the press conference.

She found that a bit more endearing than she wanted to.

She didn’t want to think that she owed him, even as her feet were snug in those boots. And she also didn’t want to derail something that might help thousands of people in her city.

She hadn’t expected the ethical dilemma. She hadn’t expected it to twist her stomach up as much as it had.

And she hadn’t expected it to make her reporter self examine whether or not her childhood circumstances were getting in the way of her objectivity.

She could hand off the story to someone else. That would take care of the ethical issues—kinda.

Because she would have to explain to her editor why she was taking herself off the story, and putting herself in the position of researcher instead of writer. And if she did that, then the story of Niko North’s attempted escape from his obligations would hit the press and have an impact she couldn’t control.

Withholding that information, though, might get her fired.

She clutched the files.

She had some thinking to do.

5

WHEN THE PRESS conference officially ended, Raine grabbed her microcassette recorder, and started to leave with the other reporters. The TV reporters had cleared out long ago to prepare their stories, while someone from their organization remained behind to retrieve the mike and the other equipment. Some of the print reporters were gone too—the older ones who never used recorders but took copious notes, mostly in some kind of personal, indecipherable squiggles.

She made it to the door before she stopped. She had an idea.

She doubled back to find two of the young people who’d been handing out folders picking up the debris on the floor. She was about to ask them to find Niko North for her when Jørgen the marketing director came out of the back, talking with the pretty elf-like woman about contacting Claus & Company.

“Excuse me,” Raine said. “I’d like to speak to Niko North.”

Jørgen gave her a withering glance. “I’m sure you know, miss, that we’re not going to let any of you speak to him today.”

She expected that. “I’m not just anyone. I’m Raine Wilkins with the Chicago Courier. I spent yesterday evening with Mr. North.”

“You and five hundred other people, Miss Wilkins,” Jørgen said.

The pretty elf-like woman tugged on his sleeve, just like she had with Niko.

“Not now, Falda,” Jørgen said.

“Oh,” Raine said with a smile, “you might want to listen to her. What she wants to tell you is that Mr. North left the event early. No one could find him for hours. I drove him downtown, where he bought a nice sweater and some jeans so he could look like a regular person.”

Jørgen’s eyes widened. The pretty elf-like woman was biting her lower lip.

“And,” Raine said, lifting her right leg, “he bought me these lovely boots.”

Jørgen looked alarmed. It took him a good ten seconds to regain control of his face.

“We don’t believe in tit-for-tat press coverage,” Jørgen said. “You don’t owe us anything. I’m sure you noticed that Niko doesn’t understand the rules—”

“What I noticed,” she said, “was how unhappy he was. He was talking about running away….”

Jørgen rolled his eyes. “Oh, great. Just great.”

Falda, the pretty elf-like woman, tugged his sleeve again and nodded toward Raine.

Jørgen glanced down at her and said, “Well, he won’t have that concern shortly.”

“What?” Raine asked.

Jørgen looked at her, as if surprised she was still standing there. Then he shook his head. “What do you want to discuss with him, Miss, that I can’t help you with?”

She hated the “Miss.” The first couple times she was willing to assume he had misspoken or mispronounced “Ms.” with that unusual accent of his. But now that he kept repeating it, she knew that he meant it. She felt more than a tad belittled.

Besides, she wasn’t sure how she could answer the question he asked. Part of the reason she wanted to see Niko was to discuss the ethical dilemma he had put her in. She wanted to apologize in advance for anything she did that might hurt him.

Her cheeks heated as she realized that was one of her underlying motives. She was about to say something when the Jørgen rolled his eyes again.

“Wonderful,” he said. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

He had clearly misunderstood her blush to mean that she had had some kind of intimate relationship with Niko.

She let the misunderstanding hang.

“Go get him, Falda,” Jørgen said to the pretty elf-like woman. “And tell him—oh, jingle bells, I don’t know—just tell him to get his rear out here.”

Jingle Bells? Rear? This company tried to present itself as squeaky clean, and that had even gotten into the language.

“You, young lady,” Jørgen said to Raine. “You have to understand I will be standing here as you speak to him, keeping track of every word. I will interrupted, and I will keep this interview on track—”

“No, you won’t, Jørgen.” Niko had come out of the back. His hair was mussed and he looked rumpled. “I’ll talk to her alone.”

“No,” Jørgen said. “Our rears are already in a sling because of this fiasco. I’m not going to have you make it worse.”

Niko sighed. “Raine,” he said quietly. “You didn’t tell me you were a reporter.”

“You didn’t tell me you were a mogul,” she said.

Niko gave her a half-smile, then nodded. He stepped down from the podium. He stopped a foot away from Raine. His clean scent seemed stronger than it had the night before. “You can leave us, Jørgen.”

Jørgen shook his head repeatedly, like a misbehaving child. “I can’t—”

“Look, it’s not going to matter.” Niko sounded tired. “I promise I won’t say anything untoward.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you,” Jørgen said. “You wouldn’t know ‘untoward’ if it bit you—”

“Jørgen,” Niko said. “Please. Give me a moment.”

Jørgen jabbed a finger at Raine.

“Young lady,” he said (and she wanted to smack him, she really did), “you will understand that everything Niko North says to you, and I mean everything, is off the record.”

“That’s not necessary,” Niko said. “Besides, there are some things I want to clarify.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Jørgen said. “You will not clarify. You will not add. Is that clear?”

“No,” Niko said. “It’s already—”

“How about this,” Raine said to Jørgen. “I’ll consider this interview off the record if I can use some of the information as deep background. If I believe that some of the information needs to be attributed to Niko, I will have you look at the quote. Provided you work within my deadlines.”

She stared at the Jørgen.

He stared back.

Niko was frowning. She wasn’t sure he understood anything she had just said to Jørgen. But Jørgen clearly understood her.

“I didn’t think the Chicago Courier let its subjects review quotes before they were printed,” Jørgen said.

“We don’t normally, but this isn’t a normal situation. Besides, I’m not planning to do anything controversial here,” Raine said. “I just want to talk to Niko. If that’s what it takes to have a conversation, then I’m willing to compromise.”

Jørgen shook his head. Then he brushed his hands together, as if he were clearing dirt off them.

“This is your mess, Niko,” Jørgen said. “I’m making some notes so that I don’t get fired.”

“Family doesn’t get fired, Jørgen,” Niko said.

“But they do get demoted,” Jørgen said, “and sometimes that’s worse.”

Raine frowned. They were related? They looked nothing like each other.

“If you screw this up even worse than you have,” Jørgen continued, “then you answer to your father, not me. And I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near headquarters when that conversation happens. He’s already upset—”

“He knows about the press conference?”

“What part of ‘he sees you when…’ do you not understand, Niko? Sweet candy canes, man, you grew up with this.”

Sweet candy canes? Really? Did people say things like that? Raine frowned. And quoting old Christmas standards? Was that for her benefit? Did Claus & Company always maintain a fiction that the company was headed by the real Santa Claus?

Niko was shaking his head, looking even more frazzled than he had a moment ago.

“Well,” he said after a moment, “If he already knows, then I can’t make this worse, can I?”

“Normally, I would agree, Niko,” Jørgen said, “but this isn’t normal, and it’s you we’re talking about, not your siblings. You have a talent—”

“For making things worse, I know.” Niko ran a hand through his hair. “Is all of this off the record, or does the charming Ms. Wilkins get to use our fight in her newspaper as well as my quotes?”

Raine held up a hand, deflecting the worst of this. “I just want to talk to you.”

“Go for broke, Miss Wilkins,” Jørgen said. “Clearly I can’t protect young Niko from himself. But then again, I was warned. They said no one could, and they were right. Come on, Falda. We have some damage control to do.”

Raine watched them walk toward the back, the chubby man in the handsome suit and the tiny, pretty elf-like woman. The man put his hand on her shoulder, and she reached over and touched his fingers with her own.

“A press conference is just a press conference,” Raine said to Niko. She felt bad for him. She shouldn’t, but she did. She wanted to calm him a little. “This one was out of control and it’ll dominate today’s headlines unless some politician decides to leave his wife for his mistress or something dumb like that. But, even if nothing supplants this story, it won’t last beyond the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Something equally juicy will happen tomorrow, and next week, and the week after that. So it’s really not important.”

“Not important.” Niko let out a bitter laugh. “You don’t understand. My family is all about press coverage and image. Some would say that’s all we are.”

She frowned at him. “Would you say that?”

He shrugged. Elegant, noncommittal, just like the night before. A don’t-ask-me shrug.

“We do amazing things,” Niko said, “but most of those never reach the media and probably should never reach the media. Claus & Company became an international business over a hundred years ago, and did it through clever marketing. I mean, we’d always had an international arm, but not an international money-making arm.”

He waved a hand as if dismissing his own words. She frowned, realizing she knew almost nothing about this company—and she thought she had researched it well the day before.

“It doesn’t matter. I get lost in the details and that’s probably the biggest problem of all.” Niko paused then peered at her as if focusing on her completely. “I’m sorry. You said you wanted to talk to me?”

He looked sad. She hadn’t expected it, the way the planes of his face flattened, the slight downturn to his mouth. His features looked odd in this position. Normally, they looked like they were made for smiles.

When she didn’t speak up right away, he said, “I didn’t mean to bribe you with the boots. That’s what Jørgen thinks I did. He thinks I’m just a screw-up. I really meant those as a gift. That’s what my family does best. We give gifts.”

He had told her that before. Her frown deepened, partly because she still felt an urge to soothe his feelings. She shouldn’t feel like that, particularly in the middle of an interview, even an off-the-record interview.

She gave in to the feeling and raised one foot. “They’re comfortable,” she said, looking down at the boot. “And I’m grateful.”

“They don’t leak?” he asked.

“They don’t leak,” she said.

He smiled, just a little. “Well, I did one thing right, then.”

She almost corrected him. It hadn’t been right; it hadn’t felt right; and now, because of the boots, her integrity was being called into question. And so was his.

Which brought up the reason she wanted to talk with him. She sighed softly.

“Look, Niko,” she said. “I had no idea who you were last night—”

“I know,” he said.

“And you clearly had no idea who I was,” she said.

He nodded.

“But we know now,” she said.

He froze in place, as if expecting another blow.

She continued, “Technically, because I was a part of the events last night and an eyewitness to everything, I can write about them. That’s perfectly legal in my profession.”

His expression hadn’t changed, but it had solidified as if he were afraid to move his facial muscles as well as the rest of his body.

“I’m…uncomfortable doing that,” she said. “Maybe because neither of us identified ourselves correctly, maybe because of the boots, or maybe because it felt like a moment out of time.”

His eyes followed her. Otherwise, he seemed like a statue.

“I…um…I like the idea of the Uplift Fund, and despite what I said about the press conference, this rollout might hurt it. I really don’t want to do more damage, but I’m obligated—”

“To pile on, right? Like those other reporters?” His face moved now. His cheeks were red, and his blue eyes snapping. He was furious.

She held up a hand to calm him. He stopped talking, at least.

“No,” she said. “I don’t specialize in gotcha journalism. Which is why I’m uncomfortable about last night. Something was going on with you, and I’m not going to ask you about it, not that you could answer on the record anyway—”

“I just knew it,” he said, as if he couldn’t stop himself. “I just knew it. I just knew I’d screw this all up, and everything would go wrong, and I wouldn’t pay for it, all those kids would. I just knew it, and they’re talking about sending me home, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”

His hand formed a fist and pounded the air as he turned away from her.

She was startled by the outburst. “Claus & Company is shutting down the fund?”

He pressed the fist against his face.

“Oh, not really,” he said around the fist. “What they’re saying already is that they’re going to see how the donations go. But they’re not going to push it, and the pilot program will fail before it ever gets off the ground, and it’s because of my ego. I thought I could handle the press conference. I wanted to do something different, so the press conference wouldn’t be standard, so it would get the media’s attention, and damn—I mean, dang—I mean, zowie—I did that, didn’t I? I got the media’s attention.”

She was stuck on the correction. Damn, dang, zowie? What was with this company, this family?

“Yeah,” she said softly. “You did. And not the way you wanted.”

“You think I don’t know that?” he snapped. “Je—Fu—Fudge.”

He sighed and shook his head, his hand still in a fist.

She was frowning, going over what he had just said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, relying on the Midwestern apology as a transition. “You said they’re going to pull the plug?”

“Not officially,” he said, head down. “I mean, we just announced the roll-out.”

“But the support is gone now?” She was trying to understand that. It didn’t make sense to her. “That seems awfully fast, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t they give a new project more than a press conference?”

His smile was bitter. “‘Awfully fast.’ Oh, Ms. Wilkins, you don’t know my family, and the things they can accomplish faster than anyone else in the world.”

Her frown deepened. “What do you mean?”

He shook his head. “My family never bides its time on anything. We do what we need to do when we need to do it, or so my father says. And while they understand that building takes time, they also understand that execution has to happen quickly.”

She wasn’t sure if he was making a pun. “Execution?”

“Making whatever they’re building happen. The goal, the end game.” He snorted. “No one wanted me on this project. No one wanted this project, period. I was going to prove myself, and I did. I proved just what a screw-up I am.”

“Surely, that’s not the case,” she said, not sounding like a journalist at all.

“Oh, let me introduce myself again, Ms. Wilkins.” He extended his hand. She took it, and felt a sizzle of electricity. “I’m Niko North, the baby of the North family. Coddled and beloved until someone decided I needed to grow up, and then it became clear that all that coddling had made me incompetent. I need to start on the bottom rung, no matter what my mother argued—or at least the bottom rung for my family, which means the toy factory, which means assembly, which means more screw-ups because I can’t use my hands like that at all. I’m all brain, dense and screwed-up brain, but brain nonetheless, so I’ll be stuck in the factory forever if I go home, subject to the wrath of my father, and then, when he retires, the mercy of my siblings, whoever takes over the company, and my future is set. Oh, joy.”

He hadn’t let go of her hand, and she wasn’t letting go of his. They felt connected by more than just skin.

“Based on one press conference?” she asked.

“And a lifetime of negative expectations.” He sighed, then looked down at their joined hands. “You know, you’re the first woman I’ve met in the Greater World outside of planned events?”

“The Greater World?” she asked.

“Oh, now I’ve slipped and given you the mindset of my family. There’s our world and your world, which is called the Greater World. Ours is tiny but important, a little fiefdom in the middle of a vast fairy tale, that everyone seems to believe in but me.”

He had used the word fiefdom in the press conference.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

He let her hand go. She felt the separation like a personal loss. It took two seconds too long to pull her hand back and let it fall to her side.

“I’m not supposed to tell you. I’m not supposed to say half the things I’ve just said, none of which probably makes sense outside of the context of my family or the company, but oh, well. It’s off the record anyway.”

He took a deep breath and smiled. The smile was sad, but real, not like some of his earlier smiles.

“What I was going to say,” he said, “before I tripped again, and mentioned the Greater World, was that I enjoyed spending time with you yesterday, even if you found it weird, and I only acted the way I did because I liked you, and did you know that when you’re cold, the tip of your nose turns red? I think that’s charming. I think you’re charming, and I didn’t mean to put you in an awkward position. I know you want to talk to me about that position, and about reporting what happened, and about how strange it all was, and how I was running away, and all I want to say is, go ahead. You can’t hurt me, Ms. Wilkins. I’ve managed to do that all by myself.”

He nodded at her, then turned and walked away, just like he had done in the coffee bar.

“Wait, Niko,” she said. “I want to—”

He waved a hand behind him, then turned around, still walking away, backing away, actually. “We probably won’t see each other again. They’re going to send me home. That’s what they do with screw-ups. So let me say this, thanks for trying, and for caring enough to talk at least, and thanks for those few hours yesterday when I didn’t have to think about—”

He waved his hand at the room, as if indicating it. But she knew what he meant. He meant the press conference, his family, and the big to-do.

“Thank you, Raine Wilkins,” he said. “It’s been my pleasure to know you.”

And then he turned and left the room.

She was alone among the chairs and the Christmas trees and the leftover equipment, some folders scattered on the floor. She couldn’t see him anymore.

His pleasure? He had meant that. And they had had a strange encounter the night before. It wasn’t one of the best times she’d ever had, but it was one of the most memorable.

And he, he had been interesting, and strange, and attractive.

She closed the hand that had touched his, still feeling the warmth of his skin on hers. She wanted to go after him, apologize, take him for coffee or lunch or get him out of here.

Everything she wanted had nothing to do with her job, or his job, or anything they could do.

He had walked away.

She needed to as well.

Once Upon A Time…

A little closer to now…

6

THE WORLD CHANGED, like it always does.

Raine wrote the press conference story, did the analysis of the Uplift Fund, not that it mattered, because, just like Niko predicted, the Fund never really got off the ground.

For years, she wore the boots from the day the first snow fell until the day the snow melted, and as she predicted she would, she thought of Niko when she put the boots on, and sometimes, when she walked through deep drifts or cold slush, she thought of him too, because her feet remained warm and dry.

The boots lasted longer than her job at the Chicago Courier, longer than the Courier itself. The Chicago Courier tried to make the transition to digital, but failed mightily, and blamed the Internet—although Raine wondered if the problem was the fact that Chicago had two bigger dailies, and a third simply couldn’t handle the competition.

Not that it mattered to her; she had left the Courier before it had left Chicago, hired away by the first of several hard-news start-ups that never quite made it off the ground.

As a hobby, she started blogging under a pen name about non-hard-news things, almost magical things, combining her hard-news research habits and her love for the strange. Initially, she had planned to call the blog the Daily Raine, but decided against it when one of her start-up bosses found out she was going to write the blog and tried to claim ownership of it.

Instead, she used an alias and set up her website as a separate business, difficult to trace. She called the site Fiefdoms and Fairy Tales. She asked for donations to support it and didn’t hire staff, although she occasionally wrote under more than one name to give the appearance of a larger company.

By the time she started the blog, she no longer lived in Chicago. She had moved to Washington, D.C. for one of her start-ups, then to New York for another, and finally to Los Angeles for a third. She kept her apartment in LA when she started the blog, but she realized that the cost of living in California was double that of her hometown.

Besides, she didn’t count fire and flood as seasons. She preferred rain and heat and snow. She didn’t like LA. She wanted to go back to Chicago.

It had taken a while for her to decide to move, however, because she had been so very poor when she had lived in Chicago. Her memories of Chicago were tied to her memories of poverty.

She had to clear those links—and clear the thoughts of that girl who had stood in the snow in leaky boots, watching rich people dance.

She didn’t have enough money to buy a mansion, even though she made more money now than she could have imagined back in her leaky-boots days. In fact, she made a lot of money, more than her editors had made at the Chicago Courier, more than some of the local TV people made, as well.

But her income was based on donations and freelance articles, and she didn’t trust it, knowing it could all change in a heartbeat. She had a lot of money socked away, enough to make a sizeable down payment and still have money (earning next to nothing) in savings.

She knew she was being too conservative, but that was the result of her upbringing. It still had an impact on her every single day.

It didn’t stop her from taking some risks, though. Like leaving the L.A. Basin and moving back to the Midwest. Like freelancing. Like setting out on her own, something her parents had never done.

She finally settled on one side of a duplex near Lincoln Park, not too far from DePaul University. The neighborhood alone made her feel rich. The duplex added to the feeling, since she was in a brownstone with some history and a lot of extra room. The three bedrooms, narrow living room, and newly renovated kitchen made her feel like she had hit some kind of jackpot.

She had finished moving during October, as the leaves were turning colors and falling with each rainstorm. She had forgotten how much she loved the smell of decaying leaves, how nice the cool crisp air was, how nice the scent of wood smoke from fireplaces truly was.

She spent her days walking even when it rained, familiarizing herself with the changes in the city. Once, she had known it as well as she had known her own body. Now, she was relearning where some things were, what had been moved, and what had disappeared.

When she unpacked, she found her boots. She somehow had managed to keep them through all the moves and through the purging of possessions she went through as she went from tiny Los Angeles apartment to tiny Los Angeles apartment.

She set the boots near her door for the day of the first snow, which arrived a day earlier than predicted.

And, as she pulled on the boots, she thought of Niko North, just like she always did. And she wondered, just like she always did, what had become of him.

She had begun her blog way back when, as a means to track down information on Claus & Company. She had learned that it was a closely held private corporation that did not release much financial material to the media. From what she could tell, it made billions in annual revenue on a variety of projects, had more charitable arms than she could track, and had offices in every major city in the world.

The company also had a huge media arm, which she ran afoul of whenever she made even a passing negative mention. Other blogs would appear, refuting her claims or explaining them. Not that she minded. Whenever Claus & Company’s media friends mentioned her, her blog traffic increased. When her blog traffic increased, so did her donations.

She found it odd that she would profit from negative publicity. She knew that some of her fellow bloggers would often plant negative stories inside their blogs for that very reason, and she fought hard to remain as objective as she could, even when someone was throwing money at her.

She also kept what proof she could for her claims. She had no corporate backers, no legal team at the ready, and so she felt the only defense she had against defamation or libel charges was the research and links that she had found.

She carried that philosophy through all of her posts. She had done an exposé of a business called the Archetype Place in Anaheim, which seemed to have all kinds of strange characters working for it. As far as she could tell, the people connected to the Archetype Place believed they were archetypes, or at least had magic, like the people from the original fairy tales they resembled.

Through the Archetype Place, she discovered a man who many were convinced was the actual Prince Charming. He owned a bookstore. Of course, she couldn’t prove he was Prince Charming, any more than she could prove that his ex-wife was Cinderella. Raine had to dismiss the strange things his daughters told her as fancies of young, lonely little girls.

But Raine had glommed onto the phrase “The Greater World,” which they had all said, just like Niko North had.

She couldn’t track down the usage of “The Greater World,” but it bothered her all the same.

She thought of that phrase, too, when she put on the boots the day of the first snow, just before Halloween. The boots were as warm and comfortable as she remembered, even though she could have sworn her feet had grown in size over the years. (The shoe salespeople told her that was normal—everyone’s feet spread with age. She was beginning to hate those “with age” comments, particularly since she was clearly no longer a young, cute reporter, but a woman with crepe neck and crow’s feet, who didn’t quite look her age, but didn’t look like she was twenty, either.)

Raine slung on a heavy winter coat, grabbed her gloves, and stuck a knit cap in her pocket. She hated wearing anything on her head. She had ear muffs if she needed them, but she hated those, too. She liked the coolness against her scalp. She would only put on her cap when the tips of her ears felt like they were about to freeze off.

She knew she had probably overdressed for her walk, but she didn’t want the blast of cold that would hit her as she went outside to derail her daily exercise.

She loved the walks. Every day, they took her somewhere new. On this day, she had chosen to walk the few miles from her home to Old Town. Even though she had driven to some Second City and Steppenwolf Theater performances in the area, she hadn’t walked the neighborhood. It had looked, from her brief dashes from a secure parking space to the theater, like the neighborhood had gentrified since she last lived in Chicago.

It took a while for her to get to Old Town proper. She meandered her way there, taking North Avenue and North Wells only when she couldn’t avoid them any longer.

She walked past restaurants she hadn’t seen before, smiled when she saw the tobacco shop was still in its place. She had done a Life and Style profile on the owner, and had learned that back in the day, it had been a head shop, selling drug paraphernalia, but as the owner had outgrown his marijuana habit, so had his customers.

Raine couldn’t go inside, because the smell of tobacco made her sick, but she loved looking through the window at the beautiful humidors and the sculptures. She was glad the shop remained, since so much of the neighborhood had changed.

She headed down the tree-lined street, looking at some of the other businesses, ones she did not recognize. As she went farther, it became clear that the Old Town rents had gone up near North Wells, but not in the outlying parts of the neighborhood. Sketchy shops with only a bit of shelf space looked like they hadn’t been in business long, and that made her smile, pleasing her almost as much as the first thick, wet flakes of snow.

The flakes fell faster than the usual Christmas snow because they were so heavy. As the flakes fell on her, they melted, and she knew she couldn’t be out here long because she would get soaked. Still, she turned her face toward the pillowy gray sky, and let the snow chill her bare skin.

She had stopped walking. She turned in circles like a child in her first snowfall, feeling that same joy. Only she wasn’t jumping or extending her arms or crying out with happiness. She was trying to maintain some semblance of adulthood, not that it mattered. It had been a long time since she had known anyone here.

“Nice boots,” a man’s voice said.

She started, and looked around for the source. She didn’t see anyone. Some cars drove by, sending slush flying, but no one else was on the rapidly darkening street.

She was about to walk away, when the voice added, “Do they leak?”

The accent was faintly European, as if the speaker had learned English on the Continent. A tingle ran through her.

She probably should have assumed that the speaker had just stumbled on words tied to the boots’ history and walked on, but she couldn’t leave, not without looking.

Besides, that accent caught her. How could that voice have all three elements she associated with Niko North? The warmth, the clipped European words, the knowledge of her boots?

She swallowed, and searched for the voice. It had come from in front of her. She saw a shadow in a doorway not too far from where she stood. The shadow moved, and her heart pounded. It was clear the shadow belonged to a tall man, whose features she couldn’t quite see in the twilight.

She took a few steps forward, and the man stepped out of the doorway.

Her breath caught.

It was Niko.

His blond hair was longer, brushing against his collar. His face was thinner, and his skin had gained some sun damage, so he didn’t look quite as perfect as he had years ago.

His smile seemed more sincere, though.

“Raine?” he asked.

“Niko?” she said.

And the next thing she knew, they were embracing like old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. That electric feeling caught her again—she had forgotten it—and she backed up, quicker than was probably polite.

He had taken a step back, too, and ended up beside the plate glass window with the words Uplift Foundation etched on it.

She pointed to them, feeling surprised. “So your family let you run the charity after all.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I haven’t been in contact with my family in years.”

She felt a pang of sadness. She was alone too—her parents having moved too far away for casual visits—and she felt it as the holidays approached. In the past, she had tried to hook up with a new boyfriend long about Halloween, but then she realized she was acting out of need rather than desire and resigned herself to a life alone.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.

Niko shrugged. She had forgotten the shrugs, and how communicative they were. That had been a let’s-change-the-subject shrug.

“The snow’s coming down pretty hard,” he said. “There’s a great coffee shop nearby.”

“Shades of the past,” she said.

He smiled.

“Don’t you have to stay with your—what is it? A store? An organization?”

“It’s five,” he said. “I’ve shut down for the day. I was just heading to my car when I saw you.”

Then he raised a finger and touched it to the side of his nose. She flashed on a painting she’d seen in a child’s book illustrating the poem A Visit From St. Nicholas, “laying his finger aside of his nose…”

She glanced around to see if there was a chimney nearby, but there wasn’t.

Fanciful. That was her problem. That had always been her problem.

“You know,” Niko was saying, “I still owe you dinner.”

She smiled. “These are the same boots that you bought me,” she said. “I’ve worn them for years, and they’ve been wonderful. So if anyone owes someone dinner, I owe you.”

“Well, then,” he said, “let’s go somewhere lovely and haggle over the bill.”

He extended his arm. She took it, faintly startled at their comfortable familiarity. She was older now, more sure of herself and what she wanted. She also knew how to get out of difficult situations.

But he seemed calmer too, a lot less upset and a lot less stressed. That attraction she had felt from the moment she met him flowed strong and fine between them.

Maybe she was comfortable because she had thought of him so often, and regretted her part in their strange interaction. Or maybe she was comfortable because she had researched the North family and their company deeply now. She had tried to figure out who they were and what they really did.

Although she hadn’t known that Niko was estranged from them.

They walked back to North Wells Street. The streetlights had come on, and the snow flurries reflected in the light. Quite a little storm was brewing. She hadn’t expected it.

They discussed the weather and the snow—always safe topics in Chicago—as he led her to DiGillio’s, an Italian restaurant that had been part of the city longer than the cigar shop. The entire neighborhood smelled faintly of garlic and tomato sauce.

Her stomach growled. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

The outdoor tables on the brick-lined patio still had chairs beside them, but the tabletops were covered with wet leaves and a growing blanket of snow.

The plate glass windows on either side of the door contained further reminders of the season. A poster for a Halloween party two days away mentioned a live band. A poster on the other window advertised Brunch with Santa. The poster showed a slenderish Santa, handing a present to a pretty little girl with red and green ribbons mixed in her cornrows. A large red sticker beside the poster said, Brunch With Santa! Get Your Reservations Early! Usually sold out before Thanksgiving!

Niko pulled open the door. Warm air hit Raine as she stepped inside. The scent of garlic and tomato sauce mixed with baking bread and a faint hint of wood smoke.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. The restaurant looked just like it had the last time she had been here, at least ten years before. Tables lined one wall, and doors led to larger rooms behind. The beautiful bar glistened in the evening light. Fake spiderwebs hung off everything, and tiny pumpkins sat in the middle of every table.

It felt odd to see Halloween decorations as the first snow fell. The snowfall had put her in the mood for Christmas, something that almost never happened to her.

“Niiiii-ko!” the bartender shouted, setting down a rag he was holding and coming around the bar. He gave Niko a guy hug, then turned to Raine, eyebrows raised. “What do we have here?”

“Someone I met long ago,” Niko said. “Brett DiGillio, meet Raine Wilkins.”

The owner. She hadn’t expected to see him there on a weekday afternoon.

Raine pulled off her gloves and extended her hand. DiGillio took it. His fingers were vaguely damp, probably from that towel.

He grinned at her, muttered something about it being a pleasure, and then looked at Niko.

“Niko, my man,” DiGillio said, “be careful or your lone wolf reputation will fade.”

Niko gave a sideways shrug, almost unnoticeable. Raine saw it, but she doubted DiGillio did—or if he did, he ignored it.

“Ms. Wilkins,” DiGillio said. “Do you know who you’re with?”

“I haven’t seen him in—”

“Niko North is the best Santa we have ever had in this city, maybe in this state. We’re lucky to get him to work the room for our brunch. Word’s gotten around, and the damn thing is the most popular event we host, period. Even if the Cubs or the Sox or Da Bears or Da Bulls are in the playoffs, this place is never as crowded as it is when our Niko dresses up like a jolly old elf.”

“Please, Brett,” Niko said. “You’re not supposed to—”

“And the gifts! Oh, my word,” DiGillio said. “We buy them, but they somehow get some of that Niko magic. Because people rave about them years later. The man is gifted, pun intended.”

Raine smiled. DiGillio’s enthusiasm pleased her rather than putting her off.

“He is,” she said. “He gave me these boots years ago and I’m still wearing them.”

“It’s like he knows the perfect present for each person. He ever leaves, and my holiday season will implode, let me tell you.” DiGillio led them to a table near the fireplace. A real fire burned low and warm.

DiGillio pulled out a chair for Raine, then helped her remove her coat. He hung it on a peg nearby. Niko hung his coat beside hers. Both coats dripped on the wood floor.

“Snow, already,” Niko said, obviously trying to change the subject.

“Yeah, I’m ready,” DiGillio said. “Summer was too hot and too long this year. We can skip the fall crap and move right to winter.”

“Looks like we have,” Raine said, as she lowered herself into the chair.

“I got some fresh baked garlic bread for you, and a new sauce I want you to try.” DiGillio directed that last at Niko. “And you, Santa boy, you keep her around. She’s pretty and smart and obviously don’t need idiots like us. So watch yourself.”

Niko’s smile was both warm and dismissive. “I will.”

DiGillio scurried off, snapping his fingers as he went, at a woman who lingered near the bar. She picked up the rag and slipped behind the bar, clearly taking over for him.

“Sorry about that,” Niko said. “I didn’t expect Brett to be here. He usually works the weekends.”

“I don’t know what you have to apologize about,” Raine said. “He likes you.”

“Yeah.” Niko settled into his chair, moved the napkin-wrapped silverware to one side, and glanced at the fire.

“Does he know your family owns Claus & Company?” she asked.

“No,” Niko said, “and I’d like to keep it that way.”

“What happened?” she asked. Then she waved her hand as if she could bat the words away. “It’s none of my business, sorry. Old habits.”

“You’re still a reporter?”

“Not like I was,” she said. “I freelance now, and blog about various topics.”

“And you make enough to live on?” he asked. And then he imitated her hand-waving gesture, and he clearly wasn’t making fun of her. He seemed embarrassed. “Sorry. That’s none of my business.”

She laughed. “Well, maybe we should just be nosy, and have a conversation. What do you say?”

He tilted his head slightly. He had laugh lines—or were they frown lines?—around his eyes. The years had treated him well.

“I think most of our problems that first day came because we weren’t nosy, and we didn’t ask embarrassing questions,” he said. “So yes, I’m all for nosy.”

She folded her hands in front of her. “Actually, let’s be fair to our younger selves. We didn’t have time to ask the right questions. We had no idea what the right questions were. And you were in some kind of crisis.”

“Yeah.” He nearly whispered the word. As he did, DiGillio arrived at the table. He set a large basket of steaming bread in the center and then gave both Raine and Niko a small bowl filled with a dark red sauce.

“What’s this?” Niko asked.

“New family recipe,” DiGillio said. “If you like it, it’ll be our winter holiday special.”

“That’s a lot of pressure,” Niko said, but he took a spoon and dipped it into the sauce. Then he nodded at Raine. “If I try, you try.”

She smiled, dipped her spoon as well, and took a taste. The sauce was rich and beefy, with flavorful tomatoes, oregano, and some spices she couldn’t identify. And then, just as she thought the taste was over, some kind of sharp pepper bit the back of her tongue.

“Wow,” she said. “That has quite a punch.”

“Brett is a master,” Niko said. “Serve it with…what? Rigatoni?”

“I was thinking good, old-fashioned spaghetti,” Brett said. “ You want some of this for dinner? Or I’ll make you chicken parm or anything else you want.”

He looked at Niko when he said chicken parm, so it was clear Niko ordered that often.

“This sauce with spaghetti would be wonderful,” Raine said, “and whatever wine you think would go with it.”

DiGillio raised an eyebrow at Niko. “Pretty, smart, and with good taste. Niko—”

“I got it,” Niko said, cutting him off. “And I’ll have the same thing—without the wine. Just some coffee.”

“I got that,” DiGillio said. “Like I’d serve you wine.”

And he walked away.

Raine tilted her head. “Did I miss something?”

Niko shrugged one shoulder. “Spirits and I…well, my entire family, really…we don’t get along.”

Her eyes narrowed. Had he been drinking that night she met him? Was that what had been going on?

“And before you ask,” he said, “I learned that lesson in what you would call high school.”

“What I would call high school?” she asked.

“I wasn’t raised here,” he said.

“You can’t tell from your accent,” she said with a smile.

He looked startled. “I still have an accent?”

“The kind only the best European boarding schools provide,” she said.

He studied her for a moment. “You looked up my history.”

She shook her head. Then stopped, frowned, and sighed. “I tried to look up your history. Your web presence is pretty tiny. It looks like someone scrubs any reference to the North family continually.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

“But you don’t know,” she said.

He shrugged, then opened both hands in a whatever gesture. “I haven’t spoken to anyone in my family in years.”

“Why not?” she asked, going for the full nosy treatment. “Was it the press conference?”

He grabbed a piece of garlic bread and set it on the bread plate. “That’s part of it. But I knew—that night we met—I should have just run away, like I said to you. I wanted to. I had already insulted two patrons at that dance because I wouldn’t dance with them, not that I could. I’m still terrible at dancing. I was just honest, which I guess wasn’t allowed. I was told to step out of the room so everyone could cool off.”

“And you took it literally,” she said.

He nodded. “I went outside, saw how pretty it all was, and then saw you. You were perfectly framed in one of the lights from the street. You looked like something out of Hans Christian Andersen. You were so beautiful.”

Her cheeks warmed. She hadn’t expected that.

“I had this moment,” he said. “It was almost like a vision. You and I, running away together, escaping my family and whatever forced you to stand in the snow. I’d made up quite a fantasy by the time we arrived downtown. I was convinced we’d be together. But of course, I didn’t tell you. I don’t tell people things—I didn’t tell people things. I just lived these movies in my head, and that’s bad, as my therapist says.”

“Therapist?” she asked. Most people didn’t admit they were in therapy, particularly over a first dinner.

But then, he’d just confessed to alcoholics in the family and to a dangerously overactive imagination. In those instances, a therapist sounded like a necessity.

“Yeah,” he said. “Eight years and counting. I’m a lot less impulsive, a lot more thoughtful, and I try to communicate.”

He flashed her an awkward smile.

“It was you, really, who started it,” he said.

“Started what?” she asked.

“My quest for self-improvement. You were honest with me that night. You said that I scared you or startled you or alarmed you or however you phrased it, and that my behavior wasn’t appropriate, and I thought it was. So I started asking people about appropriate behavior. Asking isn’t appropriate, either, but I’m just not good at reading people’s reactions, which is—well. You don’t need my full psychological history. You asked about my family.”

“I did,” she said. She was a bit surprised at herself. She wasn’t alarmed by his admissions or his rambling. Maybe she was older. Or maybe she had learned to read people better herself.

The female bartender, a lot less intrusive than DiGillio, brought a gigantic mug filled with coffee for Niko and a glass of red wine for Raine. Raine picked up the glass, swirled it, sniffed, and smiled with approval. A cabernet. Perfect.

Niko waited until the bartender left, then he held one hand over the steaming coffee, as if he were cold.

“Claus & Company shut down the Uplift Fund right after the press conference. They didn’t even do a token attempt at keeping it alive. I had spent five years setting up the fund, and because I screwed up one thing—the thing they think is the most important, mind you, but one thing—they destroyed all of my work.”

He shrugged. This one was a noncommittal, I-really-don’t-care shrug. But he did. His tone said he did.

Raine took a sip of the wine. It was rich and full. She kept her gaze on Niko’s, afraid that if she stopped looking directly at him, and nodding at the appropriate places, he would stop talking.

“They had a sleigh ready for me right after I spoke to you, and they were going to send me directly to the toy factory. I’d’ve been packing toys and dealing with fritzing computer systems that weren’t compatible with—um, with the systems that Claus & Company had. I went back, but I walked into that factory, and I couldn’t stay. I just couldn’t.”

He pulled the bread apart, then dunked one of the pieces in the spaghetti sauce.

“And that’s when I really did run away,” he said.

She had a lot of questions, but she didn’t want to ask them all, afraid that he would stop telling her anything. But she held them in her mind, particularly his weird reference to a sleigh. Had he misspoken?

If she asked about the sleigh, she would be ignoring the emotional context of the conversation. She had to say something, and it had to be the right something.

“So you came back here?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I went to England for a while, then decided I needed a real education. I finished my undergraduate degree in social work, then got a masters in non-profit management from the University of Minnesota.”

“I didn’t even know there was such a field of study,” she said.

“There is, and it’s pretty valuable. You learn fund-raising and money management, and all that stuff I was just guessing at when I was setting up the Uplift Fund the first time. I was trying to piggy-back off of what Claus & Company had been doing for nearly a century, but that’s not the same as setting it all up yourself.”

“I guess not,” she said. “Then what? You had an apprenticeship or something?”

“For me, yes,” he said. “I wanted to learn. Then last year, I came back here. I started the Uplift Foundation, and while it’s not growing as fast as I’d like, it’s growing faster than most. If I had the clout that Claus & Company has, I’d raise a lot more money, but now I worry that had I done that all those years ago, too much of the money would have gone to the wrong things. You reporters were right to ask about administration and management, and I’m afraid my answers wouldn’t have been as good as I thought they were at the time.”

Raine grabbed a piece of garlic bread. The butter oozed off it onto her skin. She set the piece on her bread plate and licked her fingers, then blushed at her rudeness.

He watched, clearly amused.

“What about you?” he asked. “You left Chicago?”

“Before the collapse of the Chicago Courier,” she said. “I’ve worked all over the country, but I finally decided to come home.”

“And you blog,” he said.

She nodded.

“About what?” he asked.

She let out a small sigh. Here was where she might lose him. “I normally don’t tell people what I blog about. I do it anonymously.”

She paused, not sure what she was hoping for. Did she want him to ask about her blog or did she want him to change the subject back to himself?

“So, you can’t tell me,” he said.

“Well,” she said. “You sort of inspired the blog. Something you said at the press conference.”

“Something I said?” he asked.

She nodded. Then she took a deep breath. She had promised him that they could be nosy, and he was asking all the right questions. She had to answer them if she wanted to see him again.

Did she want to see him again?

She barely thought of the question before she knew the answer. Of course, she wanted to see him again. She had wanted to see him again ever since they parted—and he took a sleigh back to company headquarters, whatever that meant.

“I write a blog called Fiefdoms and Fairy Tales,” she said.

He let out a half laugh, then tilted his head back. For a minute, she thought he was going to get out of his chair and leave. Then he started to laugh.

“Holy….” He still didn’t swear, but he didn’t substitute stupid words either. “You’re Fiefdoms and Fairy Tales?”

“I’m afraid so,” she said.

“You are a thorn in the side of Claus & Company. They hate you.”

“I know,” she said, wondering how he knew if he wasn’t in touch with them.

“And you did that exposé of the Archetype Place. It was brilliant, even if it didn’t go far enough. And the thing about the strange goings-on around Quixotic, that restaurant in Portland? It would’ve been even better if you hadn’t mentioned the TV show Grimm.”

“Too obvious,” she said, feeling both pleased and uncomfortable. “If I hadn’t made the connection, my readers would have. The TV show had a little too much in common with some of the things happening at that restaurant.”

“You’re close, you know?” Niko said. “You’re…”

His voice trailed off. Then he shook his head and ran a hand over his face.

“And this is why no one ever wants me to talk to the press,” he said, more to himself than to her.

She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. So, she said, “You know, if I was still working for the Chicago Courier, I’d ask you to elaborate on that.”

He looked down and shook his head.

“But I’m not going to,” she said, “because we’re catching up. Or introducing ourselves. Or whatever you want to call this.”

At that moment, DiGillio swept out of the kitchen with two plates on his hands. He set the plates before them with a flourish.

“Buon appetito!” he said, then bowed a little, and walked away.

The food smelled heavenly. Raine hadn’t realized just how hungry she was.

Niko looked at the plate like it was covered with pine boughs. Then he glanced up at her.

“You said I inspired your blog,” he said, almost reluctantly. “What do you mean?”

“The title, for one thing,” she said. “You mentioned fairy tales, and you said Claus & Company was a fiefdom.”

“I did?” he asked.

“At the press conference,” she said, picking up her fork.

“Of course I did,” he said, sighing.

“I wrote a long series of articles on Claus & Company, but I could never penetrate the layers of corporate structure. No one could. The newspaper finally pulled me off the story and moved me to something else, but by then, I had moved to the business section of the paper. And then I got hired away by some Internet start-ups, and kept writing about the intersection between entertainment and business, and that led to my blog, which I admit, is a lot more fanciful than the stuff I wrote for the papers, but just as well researched.”

“I’m amazed you found anything,” he said.

“If you know how to dig, everything is on the Internet,” she said, then paused with her fork above the plate. “Except you.”

“Yeah,” he said. “If you don’t want to be found, you don’t participate. I only just started with all that social media stuff, and I did it under the name Uplift Foundation, not as Niko North.”

“So, let’s get some of the other nosy stuff out of the way.” She didn’t want to talk about the blog any more. And she wanted to know a few things. She hoped she sounded flip. “Married? Kids?”

“No, and no,” he said. “Sadly. I like kids. Never met anyone who caught my attention like y—well, I never really met anyone, although I did date a lot at university. And you?”

“No to both,” she said. “It never worked out.”

They were quiet for moment. Raine used that silence to dig in to the pasta. The sauce was even better on al dente spaghetti. Or maybe it was the mix of flavors with the wine.

Niko ate a bite as well, then smiled. Apparently, the food was to his liking after all.

“All right then,” he said after a moment, “back to my rude question. You make enough blogging and freelancing?”

“Yeah,” she said. “A lot more than I made as a reporter. And how about you?”

“I’m still part of the family, whether I want to be or not. I have a trust. I live off the interest. In an attempt to get me to go home, they tried to cut off my money, but they couldn’t. Once my family gives a gift, they can’t take it back.”

That mention of family and gift-giving again. She decided not to pursue it at the moment. Instead, she made light.

“So I can’t give you the boots back?” she asked.

He grinned. “Nope. You’re stuck with them.”

She laughed.

“Anyway,” he said, “I don’t take any money from the fund, not even in administrative costs. That’s my donation. I’m still setting up, but my partners and I, we’re actually funding a few things around the city.”

“Do you need promotion for the things you’re doing?” she asked. She could write some freelance articles. She was already envisioning the pitch—the Redemption of Niko North (or the Revival of a Really Good Idea).

“Not yet,” Niko said. “There’re too many charities clamoring for attention during the holiday season. I don’t want to be one.”

“But some of that is for tax purposes,” she said. “Get your donations in by the end of December for the tax year, and all of that.”

“Yeah.” And she could tell from his tone what he thought of people who had to be incentivized to give to charity. “We’ll think about that when we’re established. Our big push will be in the spring. We’re coming up with slogans now, and packages, and methods of giving.”

“Still focused on children?” she asked.

“Homelessness and hunger,” he said. “The bane of our very rich culture.”

She nodded. Then decided to say, “I was homeless as a kid.”

He looked up, clearly startled. “For how long?”

“High school,” she said. “And some of middle school.”

“But you went to Northwestern.” Ah, so he had checked up on her too.

“I did,” she said. “Scholarship.”

“How did you study? How did you manage? What—”

She held up her fork to stop him. “I’ll tell you, but not over such a nice dinner. I’d rather not relive those years if I can avoid it.”

He nodded a bit too quickly. “I understand. But you can tell that this is a passion of mine, and to meet a success, to realize I know a success, that helps more than you can imagine.”

She felt warm. Maybe it was the wine or the sauce or the fire. Or maybe it was the regard of the man sitting across from her.

“Put that way,” she said, “I’d be…well, not happy to tell you. But willing. My dad lost his job, and then my parents couldn’t make payments on their house, and by the time they figured out what to do, my mom couldn’t find paying work, either, and the house got foreclosed on, and then no one would rent to us, and suddenly, we were living in our car.”

“House directly to car?” he asked.

“With some hotel rooms along the way,” she said.

“Incurring credit card debt,” he said.

She nodded. “It followed them forever. We went from shelter to shelter, and let me tell you, there are more badly run shelters than good ones. They can be scary places.”

“I’d like to know what you think makes one run well. And what we can do to improve. Can you consult with us, Raine?” He was leaning forward, hands clasped, staring at her so intently she could feel his gaze as clearly as if he touched her.

Then his right eye twinkled, just like it had at the press conference.

He flushed, put a hand over his eye, and said, “Sorry. I usually know—I mean, I can usually prevent—Sorry.”

She frowned. “What was that?”

He shook his head. “It’s just weird. It’s a family thing. It’s—”

“Niko, we decided we’d be honest.” She said.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” he said.

“Try me,” she said.

He stirred the spaghetti on his plate. “I like you.”

“I like you,” she said. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“It has everything to do with it,” he said. He sighed. “I didn’t buy your boots.”

Her stomach clenched over the spaghetti. He stole the boots? And she’d worn them for years.

“Well,” he said, still stirring. “That’s not entirely accurate. I bought boots for you. And then I made them into the perfect boots.”

He looked up. His eyes were blue and clear and seemed to have added radiance. His face was so bright and perfect that it looked like a painting of a handsome man’s face.

With both hands, he tucked his hair behind his ears. They had a slight point.

“You made the boots?” she repeated.

He nodded, looking a little frightened. “Just like I do at the Santa brunch. You heard Brett. The gifts are always spot-on.”

“‘The perfect present for each person,’” she said, quoting DiGillio. “He called it ‘Niko magic.’”

“Yeah,” Niko said softly. “Brett sees things clearer than he probably should.”

“You’re telling me that you have magic.” She laughed, but the laugh sounded nervous, even to her ears. “You went home in a sleigh after the press conference, and you have magic, and you’re the best Santa your friend has ever hired. I’d think you were pranking me, but you had no idea we were going to meet up today. Unless you do this to anyone whom you bring here.”

Niko bit his bottom lip. “I’m not pranking you, Raine.”

“You’re a family member at Claus & Company,” she said, “the organization that handles Santa’s image worldwide. You said that your family does things fast. How fast, Niko?”

He sighed. Then he shook his head.

“Niko,” she said, urging him to answer.

“You saw what they did to me,” he said. “And how fast.”

She frowned. She’d seen a lot of strange things over the years. That was why she blogged about it all. But because she’d seen strange things, she sometimes leapt to the wrong conclusion.

An embarrassing conclusion.

However, because she had decided on full honesty with Niko, she asked the question she normally would have held back.

“You want me to believe you’re Santa Claus?” she asked.

“No,” he said quickly.

“Okay, then,” she said, “you’re in line to become Santa Claus.”

“No,” he said. Then sighed again. “Not anymore.”

His words hung between them.

She could walk away, she could continue to ask questions, or she could pretend this conversation never happened. She wasn’t about to leave, and she wasn’t good at pretending.

“You’re not in line because you ran away,” she said.

“I don’t want the job,” he said. “My siblings do. They’re still fighting over it.”

“So, the magic—they let you keep it?” she asked.

He shook his head again. “That’s not how it works. I was born with it, Raine. I’m an S-Elf.”

“A what?” Somehow believing that he was an elf was harder than believing he had magic.

“An S-Elf.” Niko shrugged. This time, the shrug was apologetic. “From Santa’s line. There are a lot of us, because there’ve been a lot of Santas over the centuries. Or St. Nicks, or whatever you want to call us. Many cultures use different phrases. I’m part of the current line. My father is—”

“Santa Claus?” she asked. Her heart was beating hard. Seriously? Did Niko really expect her to believe that?

His nod was so small she almost didn’t see it.

She was beginning to get mad. She hated it when people made fun of her. “So S-Elves are what? Not human, right?”

“I don’t know how to answer that,” he said. “We’re human enough. I mean, most S-Elves marry humans. The mix doesn’t seem to cause harm, and might even augment the S-Elf magic.”

“S-Elf magic.” She was being sarcastic, but she couldn’t help herself. “And what is that, exactly?”

“The perfect gift,” he said. “The ability to make the sleighs run. A surfeit of magic, if used in the service of others. And so many other things.”

She let out a small laugh. “So, Santa’s real, but he ignores poor kids and kids from other religions, and he could solve poverty but won’t and magic is real, but it’s only for consumerism, and Claus & Company—”

“No, no.” Niko held his hands up. “When all this started, the world was smaller. Or what we knew of the world was smaller. Claus & Company really was a Northern European thing.”

“Which makes it so much better.” She wasn’t sure if she was responding to the illogic of it all or to the fact that she had had so many awful Christmases after her family lost their home or to the fact that so many other kids were just like her.

“If my family could do away with poverty, they would,” he said. “They’re working hard on trying to reach out to the poor. That’s what the charities are all about. And there’s an entire religious wing of Claus & Company that tries to help kids of religions where there is no Christmas tradition, but that’s harder, because no one wants to co-opt someone else’s beliefs—”

“And that makes it all better?” she snapped. “Your family has magic and billions and it can’t repair the world?”

“No,” he said quietly. “It can’t.”

The sadness in his tone actually stopped her. She let out a breath. Made herself breathe. Made herself think.

“That’s what the Uplift Fund was about,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “I was going to move the family’s focus from presents to good works. My uncle managed to do some of that—those toy drives of the 1990s, the food donations of recent years, the emphasis on children’s charities at the holiday season—but it was all patchwork. I wanted to do something so much bigger.”

“And they stopped you?” She couldn’t quite believe she was asking the question. Did that mean part of her thought he was telling the truth?

He ran a hand over his mouth, almost hiding another sad smile. “To answer that, I’d have to defend Claus & Company, and I don’t want to.”

“Do it anyway,” she said. “Make me understand.”

“The image. They have become focused on the image. It makes sense; it brings in money that they then use for materials for the non-magical toys. It keeps the troops fed. It enables the existing charities to work.”

“And you screwed up the image?” she asked.

“They thought I would. I came close. I would have had to go back to training as well as work in the toy factory,” he said. “I’d already gone through the courses at Image Consulting, and they said I was hopeless. They were right.”

“Toy factory,” she said. “Training. Home. And a sleigh. Don’t tell me. You’re from the North Pole.”

The hand moved from his mouth to his forehead. “Not your North Pole,” he mumbled.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’m not supposed to do this.”

“Do what?” she asked.

“Tell anyone—ah, hell.” He stood up and walked to her side of the table. Then he crouched. “I don’t have good social skills, Raine. At home, they say I was born without social skills, whatever that means. And so, here, listen, if I offend you, I’m sorry. But I have to know something.”

Her heart was still beating hard. She now understood why her younger self had run away from him. Her younger self hadn’t learned how to differentiate between people without social skills and people who were dangerous.

She knew the difference now. And even though he was too close to her—or so her younger self would have said—she didn’t mind, as crazy as all of his talk was.

She really didn’t mind.

He took her hand. That electricity remained. She liked his touch.

“May I kiss you?” he asked. “It’ll probably be my only chance ever, given how badly I’m screwing up yet again, but I would really like to—”

She leaned forward and pressed her lips against his. His mouth was slightly open and he sighed into her before deepening the kiss. He didn’t taste of spaghetti, like she expected. He tasted of hot chocolate, and a little deeper into the kiss, of peppermint.

She put her hands on his shoulders and pulled him even closer. They stood together, and the kiss became more than a kiss. It became—

“Get a room,” DiGillio said from behind her. “After you finish the lovely dinner I prepared for you. Or, I can move everything to one of the back rooms and ask that you not be disturbed.”

Raine pulled back from Niko. His face was flushed—hers probably was too—and his eyes looked like tiny fireworks were going off behind the lenses. He bowed his head, put his hand over his eyes, and then looked up again. The sparkling was gone—and its disappearance actually made her feel sad.

Niko blinked, then looked over her shoulder at DiGillio. “We don’t need a room. Sorry to upend things around here—”

“Stop apologizing,” Raine said. Her friend Verity would have been shocked that Raine had even said that. Verity would’ve been even more shocked at what Raine said next. “There’s no one else here. What’s the problem?”

DiGillio’s expression was cold. “He’s my friend. And I heard part of the conversation. I don’t want you to hurt him. He’s fragile.”

“I am not,” Niko said.

“You are,” DiGillio said. “You’re naïve and wonderful, and sometimes we cynics got to run interference for innocent souls like yours. And I’m going to do that. So, unless you’re serious about him, lady, back off. Because Niko has only two speeds. Charmingly casual or deeply involved.”

“You’ve seen that before,” Raine said, beginning to understand.

“He’s a good man doing good works, and you’re not going to screw him up. I mean it. The last time he got hurt, he was down for weeks.”

She glanced at Niko. He shrugged—an I-don’t-know-what-he’s-talking-about shrug. Then he returned to his chair, turned sideways, and faced the fire.

“He’s the nicest person I know,” DiGillio said.

“I got that,” Raine said. “I promise. I won’t hurt him. Now, can we finish our conversation?”

DiGillio glanced at Niko. Niko didn’t look at him.

“You be careful,” DiGillio said to both of them. Then, as he walked back to the bar, he added, “I won’t listen, but if things get heated—”

“I can handle it, Brett,” Niko said, loudly enough to be heard. “I promise.”

Raine sat down. She waited for Niko to say something, but he didn’t. So, after about five minutes, she said, “You said you had to know something. Then you asked if you could kiss me. Was that what you needed to know?”

“No.” Niko was still staring at the fire. “I had to know if the conversation we would have next was worth the risk.”

“What conversation?” she asked.

He turned his chair and faced her. Then he moved the plate of food away from him, which probably caused DiGillio distress.

Niko leaned forward. “If I tell you things, there’s no going back, Raine. And you’re a blogger, so you might use this stuff, or say negative things about me.”

She started to protest, but he held up his hand.

“You’re a blogger,” he said again. “That means you have no magic. Which means—”

“What?” she asked.

“Technology. It doesn’t work around the magical. It always falls apart or fails or—”

“You mean, as in, I have to replace my computer every year or the fact that my smart phone glitches? Have you thought about the fact that I’m not driving much?” She sounded defensive. She was defensive, in a weird way. She wasn’t sure why, though. Maybe it was his tone.

He blinked. “You have tech issues?”

“Since I had to start using it regularly. Yes. I do. It’s annoying. What does that mean?”

He smiled. His smile was large. “That makes sense. That’s how you saw into the Archetype Place.”

“What?” she asked.

“Most regular people can’t even find it, and you managed to get inside.” His grin grew. “That’s great news.”

It hadn’t been when she went inside the Archetype Place. Everyone had worked hard to get her out of the building as fast as possible.

“What’s great news?” she asked.

“You have magic. I should’ve seen it.”

She felt exasperated. He couldn’t distract her like that. “The conversation,” she reminded him.

He nodded, his smile fading. “You’re on an edge, Raine. You’ve skirted it for a long time. It’s a place not a lot of people go. It’s between the Greater World and my family’s world, and that’s where—”

“The Greater World,” she said. “You mentioned it after the press conference. And you called your family’s business ‘a little fiefdom in a vast fairy tale.’”

He started. “I did?”

She nodded. “That got me looking—that’s the title of my blog. So what are you trying to tell me, Niko? That fairy tales are real?”

“Yes,” he said.

She was about to go on when she realized what he said. “Like Santa is real?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Exactly like the stories?” she asked.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Very different and much more complicated. But there’s magic and history and all kinds of things….”

His voice trailed off. Clearly, her disbelief showed on her face.

“I knew you’d think I’m crazy,” he said. “Everyone does. I could take you to the North Pole—my family’s North Pole—but that would cause me issues, and I can’t do that, Raine. I’m not going back there.”

“I don’t know how this relates to the kiss,” she said.

His smile was sad. “I wouldn’t have told you any of this if the attraction was only passing.”

“One kiss told you it was more than that?” she asked.

“Didn’t it tell you?” he asked.

She let out a breath. It had. She had never felt that way before. That single kiss was enough to show her just how deep this relationship could become.

Except that he was crazy.

Except that he probably wasn’t.

All those things she’d seen in Los Angeles, all that she had written about in D.C., all the strange phenomena she’d investigated over the years—true?

She wanted them to be.

But she had wanted a great Christmas when she was a kid, too. One of the sad facts of growing up was to let go of childish things.

She waved a hand at DiGillio.

“Can you bring me a to-go box?” she asked.

He nodded, then glanced at Niko. Niko was looking down.

DiGillio went into the kitchen.

“So you’re leaving,” Niko said.

“I’m thinking,” she said. “Is there something I could read, something I could use to verify—”

“No,” Niko said.

DiGillio brought back the to-go box, and scraped the spaghetti inside it. He waved the garlic bread as if asking her if she wanted any.

She shook her head.

“I’m paying for dinner,” she said. “How much do I owe?”

“On the house,” DiGillio said.

“I can’t. I owe Niko a dinner,” she said.

“On the house,” DiGillio said, then glanced at the door. He wanted her out of here. She wanted out too, but she wasn’t sure why.

She felt overwhelmed.

She stood, put on her damp coat, and then grabbed the box. She started, “I just need—”

“It’s all right,” Niko said. “I understand.”

But he didn’t look at her.

She waited for a moment, and he still didn’t look. So she left.

The wet snow had frozen onto the pavement. The sidewalk crunched beneath her feet. The walk home would be treacherous, and she knew she wasn’t going to pay attention.

So she walked the half block to the Sedgwick Station and took the L home. By the time she got there, she felt as bad as she had the night she met Niko.

What was wrong with her? Why did she always feel like she needed to walk away from that man? And why did she feel guilty afterwards?

She let out a breath as she removed the boots.

Because she believed him. Because she believed in fairy tales. Because she believed in magic.

And she wanted to be rational enough not to.

7

SHE SPENT THE next month researching and digging and searching and blogging about small things while looking into the big thing.

The big thing was magic and fairy tales and Claus & Company. The big thing was that kiss, which she couldn’t get out of her mind. The big thing was that pair of boots, which she looked up on the Internet and found that there were no other boots like them anywhere—not on eBay, not on Craig’s List, not on someone’s Pinterest page.

The boots were unique, they had no wear-and-tear, and they still fit, after years and years and years.

They were hers, and no one else’s. No one else had a pair like that.

The perfect boots.

She also researched the Uplift Foundation. She had no trouble finding its non-profit documents, its tax records, its backers, and its financial situation. Everything was as Niko said: He didn’t take a salary and he paid for the overhead out of his own pocket. He’d had to get some kind of legal exemption to do that, but he had, and it would all live beyond him.

The other backers were names she recognized, many of whom were very active in Chicago charities, others active nationwide. The fund had already established a bridge program for needy kids so that they would get meals when school was not in session. There were plans on the drawing board for a new kind of shelter (still under discussion) and ways to keep children in dangerous neighborhoods safe after school and on weekends.

There was very little promotional material about the Uplift Foundation. It sounded like a need-to-know organization. But it did have a website and a mission statement: To provide opportunities for every single child in the Greater Chicago area, no matter what the child’s circumstances, no matter what the challenges.

She loved that mission. She loved that dream.

And after she had done her research, after she understood that people with both millions of dollars and private detectives on the payroll believed in Niko enough to give him cash to run his organization, she realized that she was being too judgmental.

Niko believed in magic and fairy tales and Santa Claus. If he saw himself as part of a great lineage of fairy tale creatures, so what? It didn’t matter. Maybe those were the things that he told himself to get by at night, to make it through the days.

She had told herself a lot of untrue things to survive her childhood. And she liked peering around the edges, just like she had that day she met him—not just staring at the rich, but believing that sometimes even the most mundane events could produce just a bit of magic.

That dance at that mansion in Lincoln Park had produced magic. It had conjured Niko North and inserted him into her life.

He was a good man. She knew it; she could sense it. And even if she didn’t trust her instincts (and she clearly didn’t), other people believed the same thing. Enough to support him on a crazy project that even if he had had the backing of Claus & Company, it would still take a miracle to pull off—at least, on as large a scale as he wanted to.

She had taken a lot of risks in her life, but the one risk she had never taken, the one risk she had been unwilling to take, was with her heart.

It was time. Actually, it was past time.

She hoped he would give her one last chance.

8

SHE COULD HEAR the laughter from a block away. Despite the cold, the doors to DiGillio’s were open, and the laughter from inside had spilled into the neighborhood like the warmth was spilling onto the patio.

The restaurant was clearly past capacity and no one seemed to care. Somehow she managed to squeeze past the parents clutching their flocks of children, the grandparents looking on, and the restaurant staff dressed like Santa’s elves.

She found a place to stand near the back. She climbed on a chair and leaned against the wall. From her perch, she could see the gigantic Christmas tree near the fireplace. The most amazing Santa stood in front of it, holding a toddler above his head. The toddler, a little boy, was squealing with laughter. Santa twirled him and then set him down.

The boy ran off, holding a gift that Raine hadn’t seen Santa give him. A young mother scooped the boy up, asking him what he got. His answer was lost in the general din, but his look of pleasure was not.

All of the children here looked happy. So did the parents. So did the restaurant staff.

And Santa—fat and jolly and shaking like a bowl full of jelly—appeared to be having the time of his life.

The air around him sparkled, and more than once she’d seen an amazing twinkle flash from his eyes.

She watched in silence as the holiday brunch ended, with candy canes for everyone and a mighty ho-ho-ho from Santa himself.

DiGillio—the ugliest elf she had ever seen—somehow managed to get the guests out of the restaurant. They left laughing, exclaiming about the experience, comparing notes, and comparing presents.

She climbed down off the chair, using the wall to brace herself. Then she felt a hand at her back.

Santa stood behind her, helping her stay balanced. Up close, his youth was apparent. His eyes were a deep blue, and he looked a little unsure of himself.

She was unsure of herself, too. She wasn’t sure how to talk to him.

“Brett is right,” she said. “You’re the best Santa I’ve ever seen.”

Niko smiled—his smile, not the bow-lipped Santa smile. “Thank you.”

He paused, as if he were waiting for something. Probably her apology.

“I—.” She stopped herself. “I, um, want to say that I’m sorry…”

He put a gloved finger over her lips. “No. No apologies. Just a question.”

At first, she thought he meant she could ask him a question, but his finger remained.

“Do you believe in love at first sight?” he asked.

She took a deep breath. She would have to step away from him to answer, or pull his hand aside or something.

“Because I do,” he said. “That’s real magic. You look at someone, say, across a snowy yard, and you know, you just know, that person was waiting for you.”

She ducked her head to one side. She couldn’t help herself. She was a reporter and a realist. “Love’s a pretty big word,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

She stared at him. He tugged on the beard, and it came off as if nothing had held it in place. But she knew dozens of little hands had tugged on it too, and in those instances, it had stayed on.

“Do you believe in it?” he asked.

“Love at first sight?” She thought for a second. Attraction, maybe. But that moment when he appeared behind her, wearing a tuxedo and looking like something out of her dreams, that was the moment she’d thought of instantly when he had asked the question.

“It’s like magic, isn’t it? Love?” he asked, unable or unwilling to wait for her answer. “You don’t believe in it until it happens to you.”

She smiled at him. “Magic’s a big word too.”

He shrugged one red-clad shoulder. “There was a lot of magic here today.”

“And happy children,” she said.

He nodded.

She could ignore his questions. She could take this one hour at a time, rather like she’d planned when she got here. But she had been thinking about risk—and taking risks.

“I think there are different kinds of magic, like there are different kinds of love,” she said. “I think what you did here today, that was magic.”

He froze, like he had that day of the press conference.

“But I also think that getting people to support a new charity, one you really believe in, is a kind of magic. Just like breaking away from an old system, one you don’t believe in, takes a kind of courage that most people never have.”

He let out a breath.

“I’m really cautious about some things,” she said. “My heart. I don’t know if I believe in love at first sight.”

He looked down, and then away, like he had that day a few weeks ago, the day she had walked out on him again.

“But I believe that the world gives you second and third chances to fall for the right person,” she said. “This is my third chance.”

His head snapped toward hers. It was so odd to see his handsome face beneath a shock of white hair. She knew she was seeing his future. One day, he would look like Santa Claus, whether he was or not.

“And?” he asked.

“And,” she said, “I’m going to take it, if you’re still willing.”

“Willing to what?” he asked.

“Show me magic,” she said. “Let me help you build the Uplift Foundation. Kiss me again.”

He grinned. “I can do those things.”

She raised her eyebrows at him.

He let out a small laugh, then leaned forward, hands around her waist, pulling her close despite the fake belly. He kissed her. His flavor, the same as before, chocolate and peppermint, and something else, something so him she wondered how she had lived without it.

Maybe she didn’t believe in love at first sight. Maybe she needed evidence of magic.

But this, this moment, it was going a long way to convincing her.

He broke the kiss, and leaned his forehead against hers. “I’ve never met anyone quite like you,” he said softly.

She smiled. “Is that a good thing?”

“Oh, yes,” he said.

“I’ve never met anyone like you either,” she said, and then she kissed him again.

She was falling in love. She could feel it. Just like she felt magic around her. It didn’t matter if it was true magic or just the magic of the holiday.

But it was real to her.

And to him.

This time, she broke the kiss. “I can help you. With the Uplift Foundation, with promotion—”

“Later.” His lips brushed hers. “We’ll think about all of that later.”

“What are we going to think about now?” she asked playfully.

“Nothing,” he said, “Except…”

He leaned away from her and looked at DiGillio.

“Got a room?” Niko asked him.

DiGillio laughed. “I thought you would never ask.”

He pointed to a door near the Christmas tree. Niko wrapped Raine in his arms and half-led her, half-carried her to the back.

Once inside the room, he closed the door, and peeled off the top of his fat suit. He was perfectly proportioned. He put his arms around her, and pulled her close.

“Christmas magic,” he said softly.

She laughed. “Show me how it works,” she said.

And so he did.

Keep in the holiday spirit with Fiction River: Christmas Ghosts, edited by Kristine Grayson and available from your favorite bookseller.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Called “The Reigning Queen of Paranormal Romance” by Best Reviews, bestselling author Kristine Grayson has made a name for herself publishing light, slightly off-skew romance novels about Greek Gods, fairy tale characters, and the modern world.

She writes romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter and historical mysteries as Kris Nelscott. She also writes in a variety of genre, from literary to science fiction to contemporary romance, under her real name—Kristine Kathryn Rusch. She has won dozens of awards for her writing.

As Kristine Grayson, she also edits the romance volumes of Fiction River: An Original Anthology Magazine.

For more information about her work, go to the Kristine Grayson website and sign up for her newsletter.

Look for These Other Titles from Kristine Grayson

The Fates Trilogy:

Simply Irresistible

Absolutely Captivated

Totally Spellbound

The Interim Fates:

Tiffany Tumbles

Crystal Caves

Brittany Bends

Holiday Novellas:

Up on the Rooftop

Visions of Sugarplums

Dressed in Holiday Style

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Up on the Rooftop

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

Visions of Sugar Plums

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

EPILOGUE

Dressed in Holiday Style

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

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About the Author

Look for These Other Titles from Kristine Grayson

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