“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.”
Santa Series: Three Stories of Magical Holiday Romance Page 25
