A Snowy Little Christmas

by Fern Michaels

  It’s the way we’ve always worked together. Fast, close, in sync.

  Electric.

  So when she presses end on the call, I think I know what will happen next. I think she’ll set her hands on her hips and smile at me for a second or two, letting some of that electricity crackle out and away. I think she’ll say something brief but celebratory, efficient but powerful. All business Kristen, more so now since we’ve opened this firm, and I’ll love it but I’ll get that familiar pang of missing her, and I’ll clear my throat and gather my things and congratulate her and go home to have a drink.

  Alone.

  But she doesn’t do that, she isn’t any of that, not tonight. Instead she turns to face me, and even in the heels she wears she’s got to look up at me, a disadvantage she’s never much liked, though I think she knows by now—as smart and kind and capable and funny as she is—that it’s the only one I’ve got over her. Her light brown hair, fine and straight, has started to sag a little from the tight ponytail she’d had it in when she’d entered this room this morning. Her gray-green eyes are tired but her smile is huge, so big I can see a flash of the bottom row of her teeth, a little crooked.

  She closes her eyes and tips her head back and the noise she makes—it’s a half laugh, half sigh, and I think I ought to sit right back down in my chair and take a deep breath to get over it but I can’t do it; I can’t sit down, because Kristen does the most unexpected thing.

  She hugs me.

  I make a noise, something between an oh and a mmph, and maybe someone else, someone who hasn’t wondered about this exact feeling for years, would stand stiffly out of shock. Maybe that’s what even I’d do in literally any other circumstance like this that didn’t involve Kristen Fraser—Jasper with a heart of stone, Jasper who barely bothers with a handshake, Jasper who’d do anything for the job, who’s always on to the next one. I don’t even hug my family, not that any of them would try it.

  But as soon as I feel her against me I wrap my arms around her, not like I’ve been wondering about it for years but like I’ve been doing it for years, and she’s warm and soft and perfect and she says, “I did it” and I can feel her breath against my skin and I say roughly, “You did,” even as I’m tipping my hips back slightly so she doesn’t feel what she does to me.

  You are an absolute bastard, Sorenson, I’m telling myself, trying to ignore the way the edge of her ponytail is resting against the back of my hand, cool and smooth and perfect.

  And then she pulls back but she stays holding on and she’s just looking at me, right into my eyes, and her face is flushed in the exact way it gets every time we have a win together—the day we finally told our former boss we were going out on our own, the day we signed the lease on this space, the day we landed our first recruit under our new firm’s name, the day we’d finally made enough money to hire an admin to run the office.

  Her breath hitches and she says, “Jasper,” and I have to close my eyes at the way it sounds. Breathy and surprised and wanting.

  “Kris, I . . .”

  My voice trails off when she moves a hand to my cheek, my evening stubble rough against her smooth palm. I open my eyes and she’s watching that hand; she watches, almost dazedly, her own thumb as it moves to stroke over my cheekbone, and—holy hell. Unless I can move my lower half into the next state she’s going to know about the situation down there, and I try to focus on other things while she works out, works off whatever this uncharacteristic form of affection is. There’s a tinkling echo of holiday music coming from outside the conference room, something Carol must’ve left piping out of her computer speakers when she took off a couple hours ago. That alone ought to be enough to dull this buzz, since I hate this holiday. I hate that every year it takes me away from the things I’m best at and the people I care about the most.

  I hate that it takes me away from this office.

  From her.

  “Jasper,” she says again, and she moves that thumb enough to press it, lightly, on the curve of my bottom lip. I feel like I live a lifetime in that second of pressure, like I see every fantasy I’m not allowed to have about her. Starlight, soft clothes, silence. “Kiss me.”

  It’s a demand she’s given me, but I can hear something living beneath it, a little question in the words that makes my shoulders tighten. There can’t be a question there; there can’t. I’ve followed the rules for this, for us working together and being friends, starting this business together and making it a success. I can’t ever have Kristen regretting me. I’d never recover from it.

  “Kris,” I say warningly, even though I don’t let her go. I take a breath, gathering the will I need to stop this. It feels beyond my considerable, long-honed resources of restraint. Carol’s computer speakers are tinnily piping out a version of “Let It Snow!” and I really, really hate that song.

  “Do it,” she says, and she knows why that would work. She knows I love a challenge.

  But what she doesn’t know is that I’ve always loved a chance to break the rules, and I’m so, so tired of following this one. The most important rule I’ve ever made for myself.

  I’ve missed her for so long.

  So I do it.

  I press my mouth to hers.

  Chapter Two

  KRISTEN

  December 15

  It had felt like Christmas morning, kissing Jasper.

  Like the thing you’ve been waiting and waiting for, lying in bed at night with wishes stacked up in your head. Like waking up extra early when it finally comes, the house dark and quiet and your ears straining to hear for someone else to stir, to give you permission to burst from your room and start the day’s celebration. Like holding in your hand a perfectly wrapped present, your hands fairly trembling with excitement. Is this the one? you’re thinking, holding it there. Is this the one I really, really wanted?

  Like opening that present and finding—with a burst of irrepressible joy—that it absolutely is.

  At my desk I let my eyes slide closed, blinking out the light from my computer screen, where I’ve been staring at the Nhung contract since I got here an hour ago. Going over it again like this—it’s the kind of thing I might’ve done last night, once I’d heard the “yes” I’ve been working to get for months. Six weeks from now Dr. Nhung will be starting a five-year stint with Möller Metals, a job I’m certain will make him happy, and an agreement that will bring Jasper and me one of the biggest recruiting commissions we’ve gotten since we started up fourteen months ago. A good salary bump for Carol in the next quarter, enough money to make some improvements to the office we’ve been waiting on. I could’ve heard that yes and gone back to my office, e-mailed my contact at Möller, opened this document, and let myself feel proud of what I’d done.

  Instead I’d asked Jasper to kiss me. I’d practically dared him to.

  And oh. Kiss me he did. One hand in my hair, one arm wrapped around my waist, a rough sound in his throat—

  The sharp ring of my phone stops me from reliving it—again—and even before I look down at the screen I know it’s my older sister, and I know the lecture I’m about to get.

  “Kris, you absolute hag,” Kelly says, her voice strained, her breathing shallow. I can hear the thud of her feet on her treadmill. She’s probably on mile four at least, her Bluetooth in her ear and her tablet in front of her face. Likely she’s been answering e-mails since mile one. “I have been waiting for hours. Did you get him?”

  I have a flash of my thumb on the curve of Jasper’s lip. I cross my legs under my desk.

  “I did.”

  “What the hell,” she says, and I can hear her slap the stop button. “You said you’d call! I figured it went bad and you were off somewhere with Jasper drowning your sorrows.”

  “It didn’t go bad,” I lie.

  Because it did. It did go bad, once the kiss had stopped. One pause to catch my breath—who knows how long we’d stood there like that, arms around each other, lips and tongues tangling—and in that paus
e while I’d stared at him, taken him in and what we’d done, it’d been like a light had switched on in Jasper’s head, the glazed, hungry look in his eyes before the kiss suddenly gone. He’d stepped away from me and said, “I shouldn’t have.”

  He’d looked at me like he didn’t know me at all.

  I stand from the desk and walk to my door, peeking out before I close it to the small, dimly lit lobby outside. Carol won’t be in for another hour, and Jasper—who is always here before me—still isn’t in his office across the way.

  I take a deep breath. “Kel, I messed up.”

  I try giving her an abbreviated version: a long day, a jolt of adrenaline, a huge achievement, a kiss I shouldn’t have initiated, an awkward parting.

  But I should’ve known that wouldn’t work on my sister.

  “Oh my Gooooooooooooood,” she shouts, and I wince on her behalf. It’s barely six a.m. in LA right now, and no way are Malik and their two kids out of bed yet. I shush her on instinct, but this doesn’t work either.

  “Freaking finally! What was it like?”

  I can’t say Christmas morning, obviously, unless I want Kelly to know how far gone I am, how far gone I’ve been. “What do you mean, finally?”

  “Please. ‘Jasper this, Jasper that.’ He’s all you ever talk about.”

  “We work together. We’re business partners. Of course I talk about him.”

  She ignores me. “Plus he looks like a cologne ad come to life. God. Does he still have that scar at the corner of his mouth?”

  “Uh, yes? Why would he not have it anymore?” I stifle the urge to tell her what that scar—a small, upward curving line that makes the right side of his mouth look slightly upturned, a tease for the smile he so rarely gives out—felt like against my tongue. I love that scar.

  “Who knows. People here get stuff like that lasered off, or whatever. Anyway. What. Was. It. Like.”

  I slump into my chair again, turning it out to face the window. Early morning light bathes the glass-and-steel buildings of downtown Houston. Even from up here I can hear a swish of traffic on the surface streets below. It’s supposed to be sixty-two degrees today. It doesn’t feel like Christmas morning anymore at all.

  “It can’t happen again.”

  “Oh. You’re going to play it this way, are you?”

  “Kel. This is our business. We’ve worked so hard to get here. Being with Jasper—it goes against everything I know about professional life.”

  Kelly sighs, and I know part of her—the part of her that finished her law degree two years before I started mine, the part of her that spends ten to thirteen hours a day doing contracts for the second largest studio in Hollywood—knows exactly what I mean. Before Jasper and I started this firm, I spent five years working alongside him at a massive materials conglomerate here in Houston—him part of a scouting team for new tech and the talent that produced it, me doing human resources contracts for the hires he and our former colleague Ben would bring in. When I wasn’t doing contracts, I was negotiating conflicts within the company—and more than a few of them came from romantic relationships turned sour. In my head there’s a looping echo of things I’ve said to Jasper over the years—the frustration I expressed over two people in accounting whose relationship had gone so wrong that we’d had to rearrange the whole floor to prevent worse fallout. The anger over a VP who’d promoted a woman he’d been dating over someone far more qualified. It’s too messy to do these things at work, I’d say, and the worst of it was, part of me knew I was saying it almost as a way to convince myself. To talk myself out of the things I already thought about Jasper.

  “You’re not his subordinate,” Kelly says. “And he’s not yours. You’re partners.”

  “You know it’s more complicated than that. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Maybe you were thinking you’ve been half in love with him since the day you met him.”

  Wrong. I’m pretty sure, much as I’ve tried to deny it, that I’ve been whole in love with him. Since he looked me straight in the eye, shook my hand, and asked me bluntly if I could help him write a restrictive covenant for a new hire on my first day of work. But I’ve never let it get in the way before.

  Not like I did last night.

  “I need to apologize to him. I sort of did, last night, but he couldn’t leave fast enough.” He hadn’t even picked up his suit jacket. It’s probably still draped over the back of his chair in the conference room. I press a hand to my forehead. “How could I do this? He’s my best friend.”

  “Hey,” Kelly says softly, hearing the quiver in my voice. “I’m your best friend.”

  I offer a small, wet laugh. “You know what I mean. He’s my best friend here. We do everything together.”

  “No. You work together, and work has been your everything for too long.” I can sense her changing her tactic. A born lawyer, Kelly is, and I always thought I was, too, until I started getting the itch for the recruiting side. “Maybe you’re just getting your wires crossed. You’re around him so much that you get confused sometimes. Like a work husband kind of thing.”

  I try not to feel a shudder of delight at that word—husband—in any way connected to Jasper. I try instead to cling desperately to what Kelly has said. Yes, maybe that’s it—maybe these last months especially, when we’ve been working so closely to get this firm off the ground. The scouting trips we’ve taken and the close quarters in this office. Dinners and drinks with clients that sometimes stretched into wrap-up sessions between the two of us, my place or his, late-night desserts and laughter and the occasional baseball game . . .

  “Maybe,” I say, unconvincingly.

  “Today’s your last day, right? Before the holiday?”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s right. That’s a great point.” Ugh. What am I, on a conference call with my own sister? I turn back to my computer screen, see Jasper’s office light is on now. I must not have heard him come in. “It’ll be fine,” I tell Kelly, and myself. “I’ll speak to him today, and then we’ll have a break from each other until after Christmas.”

  There’s a pause, and I know Kelly’s deciding whether to say something else about this; I know she wants to. But instead she says, “Can’t wait to see you, peach.”

  I feel a warm comfort at her words. In a week we’ll all be back in Michigan with my parents—she and Malik and my niece and nephew arrive the day before I do. We’ll make cookies and sing carols off-key and I’ll wrap presents and watch seven to ten Hallmark movies with Kelly.

  Christmas will reset me; it always does. And it’ll reset this thing with Jasper.

  “Can’t wait to see you, plum.”

  When we hang up, I feel better. I just need to get through this day, and that’ll be easy. A quick, more prepared apology to Jasper. Follow-ups and final details on last night’s deal. It’ll be over before I know it.

  My computer pings with a new message alert.

  Jasper, efficient as always.

  Conference room, he’s written. 9 a. m. We’ve got a problem.

  Christmas feels so far away.

  Chapter Three

  JASPER

  “Jasper. You are going to love this.”

  Carol bursts into the conference room at 8:56, where I’ve been sitting for a half hour, staring out the long wall of windows and trying to shake the sense memory of what I was doing the last time I was in here. I’ve got to get my head on straight in the four minutes before Kristen shows up and I break the news. If nothing else it’s bad enough that she’ll probably forget about the mess I made of last night, kissing her like that.

  Kissing her at all.

  “I mean, just you wait,” Carol says, reliably immune to my brooding even on regular days. On the day before a holiday break? She seems to take it as an invitation. “This one is going to knock your socks off.”

  I blink up at her from where I’m sitting, and she’s standing there, her ash blond hair Texas big, her brown eyes wide behind red-framed glasses with tiny
rhinestones at the edges, a set of massive earrings that look like Christmas ornaments dancing at her ears. We hired—or rather, Kris hired—Carol six months ago, and since day one she has proudly displayed her dogged devotion to holiday attire of all sorts—Independence Day, Labor Day, International Beer Day, whatever. She has also proudly displayed her devotion to showing each sweater or T-shirt or entire tracksuit to me, in spite of the fact that I can never think of anything to say in response except, “Very nice, Carol,” before going to my office and shutting the door.

  She reaches a hand into the opposite sleeve of a bright red cardigan sweater with half a Christmas tree on either side of the front buttons, and after a few seconds of fumbling, the whole entire front of it lights up in multicolored twinkling. I wince.

  “This is a great sweater, Jasper,” she says, ignoring me. “I have a backup battery. I’m going to let it run all day.”

  “Terrific,” I say blandly, but in spite of myself—in spite of the fact that I’ve had maybe thirteen minutes of sleep since I left here last night and in spite of the fact that I’m about to have an awful meeting with the very person whose face kept me awake all night—I feel a smile tug at my mouth. Most days, the soundtrack in this office is Carol’s loud laugh or her humming; she treats every admin task like it’s the newest and most interesting experience of her life, and sometimes when she prepares travel packets for me she puts a glittery smiley-face sticker on my agenda.