Their Christmas Wish Come True
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He didn’t reply. In fact, he reached behind him and shut the door, which was leaking cold air, with a snap.
“Oh.” Kirsten had been warned it was a rough part of town. She’d been told over and over to lock the door when she was in the building by herself. But what if someone came to deliver a list and the door was locked? Even one mom, turned away…she shivered.
Besides, the awareness she felt for this man that had appeared in her space was not of the fearful variety though certainly of the dangerous variety.
He was a man attractive enough to make a girl who had given up on fairy tales feel strangely threatened, as if a review of her belief system might be in order. It had been four years, after all…
“So, no Santa list,” she said, aware her cheer was forced, that she was fighting something within herself, “What can I do for you?”
He was watching her with the faintest interest touching his eyes, eyes that seemed deeper and darker the longer she looked at him, but no warmer. There was something in them that reminded her of an iceberg—magnificently beautiful, but fearsome and remote, untouchable.
“I heard you were looking for an elf.”
She was not sure she would have been more shocked if he said he was looking for The Treemont School of Ballet. The words, faintly playful, did not match his eyes. His delivery was absolutely deadpan, and then she realized he had overheard her conversation. She waited for him to smile—to see if a smile would warm his gaze—but no smile was forthcoming. It was as if he could say the words that were tinged with humor—since he was obviously the man least likely to ever be mistaken for an elf—but somehow they couldn’t break through the ice that shrouded his eyes.
“Ah,” she said. “An elf. I’m in desperate need of one, but I’m afraid you’re the wrong size. No applicants over four foot eleven. Last year’s was four foot seven.”
She found herself holding her breath waiting to see if he would smile.
“But he got drunk.” He’d heard a lot of that conversation. Still no smile. Anyone who was not going to smile over a four-foot-seven drunken elf probably wasn’t going to smile about anything. It had the ridiculous effect of making her feel as if she had to make him smile, even though she was more than aware her belief system was on shaky ground, and she shouldn’t be testing its strength.
“He got very rude,” she said, ignoring the shouldn’t. “He kept asking Santa to pull his finger.” In her eagerness to make him smile, she could feel that telltale hint of heat in her chest.
As a schoolgirl, Kirsten had been tormented by blushing. In more recent years, she’d been able to head off the embarrassing tide of crimson by thinking, quickly, of something—anything—else. For some reason the fish display at O’Malley’s Market provided some of the most powerful mind-diverting pictures. Trout, eye in.
“Sounds like a good reason to trade in for bigger elves,” he said. “Those small ones can be so unpredictable.”
“We’ve never had a large elf!” Rules. She found refuge in rules.
“Sorry to hear that—it’s probably an unfair hiring practice, punishable under the equal opportunities act.”
“Actually, I think it’s impersonating an elf that is punishable by something.” For some horrible reason the word spanking came to mind and for a minute she had to close her eyes and picture freshly filleted perch. When she opened them, she said, more weakly than she intended, “Forced ingestion of Christmas cake, egg nog and Christmas carols!”
Still no smile, but just a hint of something in those mysterious eyes, the tiniest spark of sunlight flashing across green ice.
“Now who is impersonating whom?” he asked. “I heard you claim on the phone you were Santa. An obvious lie. Santa would never think of cake, egg nog and carols as a punishment. Plus, no white beard, no belly like jelly.”
She was the one who smiled then, reluctantly delighted by this spontaneous, dangerous exchange with a most mysterious stranger on a dull, gray afternoon. She smiled until the exact moment she became aware, and acutely so, that he was inspecting her!
She realized she looked about as far from the heroine of a happily ever after kind of story as anyone could look. The warehouse section of the building, behind her office, could get cold and very dusty. She was wearing a faded brown skirt, warm tights, sensible shoes, a cardigan worn at the elbows. Her hair suddenly seemed horrible, and she wished she would have let Lulu, one of the volunteers, streak the mousy-brown to blond last week when the woman had practically begged her to let her do it.
“Kirstie” Lulu had said. “You’re twenty-three. You shouldn’t look forty!”
Naturally, now she wondered if she looked forty today! That, she told herself, was what a man did.
All of a sudden, a woman who had not been on a serious date in four years on purpose was worried about her cardigan and her hair color and was thinking, wistfully, of the donation of twenty-four shades of lipstick sitting, unopened, on her desk.
All of a sudden a woman who was pragmatic to a fault was thinking if Cinderella can do it, so can I.
“I can’t help it if your vision of Santa is limited,” she said, trying valiantly not to show how flustered her own treacherous thoughts were making her. “Around here, I am Santa. Or at least the spirit of Santa. I make sure the kids in this neighborhood get Christmas gifts.”
“Even the most liberal of them must be shocked to find out you’re Santa,” he said.
He did not seem moved by her altruism. If anything, a cynical line deepened around his mouth. It annoyed Kirsten to realize that she wanted him, a complete stranger, to be impressed with her activities and accomplishments, probably because she knew her appearance had failed to impress him in any way.