“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.”
Santa Series: Three Stories of Magical Holiday Romance Page 26
