Their Christmas Wish Come True
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She looked at the price, winced and mentally filed the piece—everything in this catalog—in her own impossible dreams file. Reluctantly, she put the catalog away. She would take it home with her and pore over the pictures later.
Really, the catalog should have been more than enough to sweep that other encounter right from her mind. So she was amazed, and annoyed, that it had not. Her mind kept wandering from the bookkeeping tasks. Not that engrossing, but as the Secret Santa Society’s founder and only paid employee, one of her biggest responsibilities. Rather than Smedley on horseback proving a distraction to her afternoon, it was eyes as coolly green as pond ice that she kept thinking of.
“And that is why you don’t even deserve to be a Serious Collector,” she reprimanded herself firmly.
CHAPTER TWO
WHEN Michael Brewster headed back out the door of The Secret Santa Society it was snowing harder. The office was on the mean end of Washington, most of the storefronts boarded up, shadows in the doorways. He noticed a man huddled in the doorway next to her building. Waiting for an opportunity to slip through that door and help himself?
She had paper taped over her own windows, probably to keep kids from peeking in at all her top-secret activities, but from a security point of view it would have been better if she left the windows unblocked.
Michael gave the man a look that sent him scuttling.
It was not the kind of neighborhood where a woman should be working alone—especially not with every available space in the made-over store stuffed with, well, stuff. Teddy bears, MP3 players, trikes, dolls in cellophane wrappers, including those embarrassing two that had fallen into his hands.
She was the kind of woman who made a guy feel protective. Maybe it was because her clothes had been baggy, that she had seemed tiny and fragile. Still, even with the lumpiness of the dress, she hadn’t been able to totally disguise slender curves, a lovely femininity that might make her very vulnerable at this desperate end of Washington. And it wasn’t as if she would have the physical strength to protect herself. Her wrists had been so tiny he had actually wanted to circle them between his thumb and pointer finger to see if they were as impossibly small as they looked.
And those eyes! Intensely gray, huge, fringed with the most astonishing display of natural lash he had ever seen. Her eyes had saved her from plainness.
Something about her reluctantly intrigued him—maybe the fact that she so underplayed her every asset.
What was she thinking, being alone with all that stuff in this neighborhood? Was she impossibly brave or simply stupid? Still, you had to give it to someone who was shopping around for an elf. There were probably special angels who looked after people like that.
He frowned at the thought, renegade and unwanted. He, of all people, knew there were no special angels, not for anyone. So he had obeyed Mr. Theodore. He’d come to this address thinking he was going to find someone in worse shape than him.
It obviously had not been her.
She had not been beautiful, not even pretty, really, unless he counted her eyes. He thought of them again—luminescent, brimming with a light that could almost make a man forget she was wearing a sweater just like the ones his granny used to knit. Her hair had struck him as hopelessly old-fashioned, but for some reason he’d liked it. It was just plain light brown, falling in a wave past her shoulder, no particular style.
She was one of those kind of girls he remembered only vaguely from high school—bookwormish, smart, capable…and invisible. She was not the kind who pretended fear of spiders or dropped her books coquettishly when a male of interest was in the vicinity. She did not color her hair blond or paint her lips red or have fingernails that left marks on a man’s back, her lashes would not melt when she cried.
In other words, she was not the kind of woman he knew the first thing about.
Nor did he want to, though that fleeting thought of her fingernails and his back made him shiver, which was startling. He had not reacted to a woman in a very long time. He had probably never reacted to a woman who was anything like her: understated, intelligent, pure.
Women, he reminded himself, took energy. He had none. It was that simple.
And a woman like that one manning the Secret Santa Society office would take more energy than most because despite her plainness, those multifaceted eyes made him suspect a very complicated nature. Deep. Sensitive. Intelligent. Funny.
It annoyed him that he was even thinking of her. His assignment, if he could call it that, was to find someone in worse pain than himself.
Not Ms. Secret Santa, obviously, hunting for elves and brimming with faith that her good deeds alone could protect her from this neighborhood.
But there were kids out there who needed jackets, and the first true cold snap of the year had arrived. He wondered what kind of pain it caused a parent who was not to be able to buy a jacket for a child who was cold.
Not worse pain than his own, different pain than his own.
Maybe that was why Mr. Theodore had sent him, knowing there would be something here to keep him distracted as Christmas approached. Christmas, a time of family. A time of pain for families who had nothing.
And for a guy who had nothing instead of a family.
He drew his breath in sharply, forced himself to focus. It was one day at a time, one step at a time, one task at a time. Right now, his task was fifty jackets and an elf. Michael shook his head like a boxer who had been sucker punched.
It seemed like the most unlikely lifeline, but it was the only one he was being offered, and if he didn’t find something to give a damn about, and soon, that question was going to burn a little deeper into him.