He got carried away, attempted a dip in their limited space, knocked over a pile of teddy bears, nearly dropped her on the floor and had to let her go.
She looked like she’d escaped the mouth of death. He knew that the dance was over. Just like Millie, he could see it in her face. She was scared he would hurt her too much.
And he probably would. Too many empty places inside him that nothing could fill. Not even the sweet, sweet love of a girl like her.
“You know what would please me?” she said. Her voice was shaking slightly. “Getting the wrapping done.”
He bowed. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, knowing better than to put up a fight, feeling an unwanted tug of regret. What if he had met her before it happened? Before he had been separated from all that mattered to him by forty-foot seas?
Probably he would have overlooked her for the flashier model. This ability to see qualities in a woman beyond a D-cup seemed to have been born as a direct result of his own suffering. He’d never been anything before but the most superficial of guys, looking for a good time, no strings attached.
He was very much aware Kirsten had turned the tables on him again. Dancing with her was not what he’d expected. She had fit with him. She had not seemed too small, and he too large. She had seemed feminine and supple and graceful. And totally alluring.
“What do you want for Christmas?” he asked again, before she made good her escape, seeing something vulnerable in her eyes.
He could get her a nice gift since his heart was all used up and he couldn’t give her damaged goods.
“An elf,” she said, quickly, “You promised me an elf. If you can find me an elf, I’ll be happy forever.”
And it wasn’t until she said those words that he realized a startling truth.
Even though she was at the center of this incredible hub of activity, even though she appeared busy and full of purpose, even though she was needed and admired and loved by all these volunteers, even though she was surrounded by magical toys and making wishes come true, the most noble of causes, Kirsten Morrison was unhappy.
Looking into her eyes at that moment, he knew her deepest secret: she dreaded Christmas. More than he did.
The thing Kirsten hated most about Michael Brewster was how he was looking at her now, as if he could read the secrets in her soul.
No, that wasn’t quite it. The thing she hated most about him was how, even though he was a man in pain, he could make Mrs. Jacobs laugh out loud, and Lulu Bishop wiggle, and Mrs. Henderson talk about the husband who had died last year.
The thing she hated most about him was how he could get a donation that she had tried to get for months, simply by turning up the wattage on that slow, sexy smile of his.
The thing she hated most about him was how he could make her blush by simply looking at her for too long. The thing she hated most about him was how, before his arrival, each day had always unfolded very much like the last one, and suddenly she was dancing down the teddy bear aisle, feeling oddly, woefully, as if her life had just begun, as if she’d been born to dance with this man.
The thing she hated most about him was, just when she thought he was the most annoyingly confident tease in the universe, she would see that faraway look in his eyes, see how the ice was still there, and sorrow. She would see just how hard he would be to love. And how easy.
He really wasn’t available. And what she hated about him was that when they danced, when he teased her, when he looked at her, when he touched her with those hard, work-worn hands, it seemed as if he was. Or should be. Or could be.
He better not really be getting her a gift! It would be a pity present, because when he looked at her she felt as if her every secret yearning was being broadcast out loud.
He looked like the kind of guy who might buy his women lingerie and decadent chocolates and effervescent wines. Not that he’d buy her that. No, she probably fell into the Millie Milesworth category: something impersonal, like those boxed mitten and hat sets that came out at this time of year.
She would never, ever tell him the truth, that what she truly wanted, if she could have anything in the world, was a limited edition figurine called Knight in Shining Armor . She was sure he would find her Little collection pathetic. Laughable.
“She wants A Little Puppy Love ,” Lulu said at the exact moment Kirsten had decided her love of everything Little was something she was keeping to herself.
Kirsten glared at her. The volunteers always chipped in together and got her one of her cherished figurines. Lulu missed the glare because she was, tongue out, trying to get a delicate ribbon to cooperate with her beefy hands.
“What?” Michael said, and laughed. He had no idea what A Little Puppy Love was, so how could his laugh hold derision?
“Ahem.” Lulu looked up, Kirsten swiftly drew a finger across her own throat.
“Nuthin’,” Lulu said sulkily. “I didn’t say nuthin’.”
“Come on, Lulu,” he said, all charm and persuasion. “Tell me what she wants.”
“Well, I thought I knew but I guess I was mistaken,” Lulu said huffily. “I’ll return the volunteers’ donations to them.”
Kirsten was going to lose an opportunity to add A Little Puppy Love to her collection? Because of him? It was worth it. She did not want him to know about her fascination with all things Little in Love .
“I knew you’d like a puppy,” he said with satisfaction.
“I’m allergic to dogs,” she shot back with equal satisfaction.
Now that he’d brought up the whole gift thing, Kirsten was wondering if she was obligated to give him a gift. She certainly didn’t want to. Shopping for him would be a nightmare of trying to appear thoughtful but not smitten.
She always got all the volunteers a small gift, a token of her appreciation. She wished she’d been generic in past years: good quality chocolates, nice bath oil. Oh, no, she’d had to prove how much everyone meant to her by matching the perfect gift to them. So Lulu got the imported silk scarf, and Mrs. Henderson got the cranberry glass to add to her collection, Mrs. Jacobs got a gift certificate for a turkey to help her with the monstrous number of people she fed every year, Mr. Temple got socks with little heaters in them.
So, what did you get a man like Michael Brewster?
A new leather jacket? Too expensive. Some good old rock and roll CDs? He probably had a substantial collection. Maybe, on a lighthearted note, a certificate for some dance lessons.
Maybe you’d get him a puppy to try to fill the hole in his heart—a little ball of fur that would grow enormous, a St. Bernard or a Great Pyrenees.
If he was her man, she’d fill his sock with little treasures, with an MP3 player loaded with love songs that would embarrass him, homemade fudge, funny underwear.
He wasn’t her man, she reminded herself. He had warned her about him. Even if he hadn’t, she didn’t want a man, she didn’t want love.
It was too easy to forget that it started like this: yearning for his smile, his eyes to linger on her. And then those yearnings grew: now they included this desire to know if they danced together often enough what it would become. It started with puppies and love songs and kisses, loving gestures and kind thoughts.
And one second could change everything. That’s how fragile it was. Except in the Little Love world where love stood still, and was always fresh and delightful and full of exquisitely tender moments, captured, never to change.
Michael had moved back to the gift wrapping table. He had managed to make a perfectly square box that contained a jigsaw puzzle look like a wrinkled elephant constructed out of wrapping paper.
Love would make that seem so cute. If Lou Little could see it, he’d probably make a figurine out of it. Love’s Little Gifts.
That’s what she hated about Michael Brewster.
“Where are the tricycles?” he asked. “I want to wrap the tricycles.”
He said it as if he was pleased with the mess he’d made of the puzzle, and now he was confident
about tackling bigger things. That was the ego of the man, never mind love’s little gifts!
“We don’t wrap the tricycles,” she told him. “They’re too hard. They take too much paper. We just put a bow on them.”
“But you deliver them Christmas Eve?”
“Yes.”
“But then some poor little kid knows what he’s getting. I mean, Christmas for little kids is about lying awake, anticipating what’s inside that big lumpy parcel. And think about nothing to unwrap the next morning. Unwrapping! It’s the spirit of Christmas. Tearing paper! Making a mess. Dying to see what’s inside that package.”
See? That’s what Kirsten hated about him. Even though he had survived his own personal hell, even though he wanted to have a hard heart, he could still feel what every child wanted on Christmas morning.
“Michael,” Lulu said appreciatively, “you could talk a virgin into skinny dipping.”
Mrs. Henderson clucked disapprovingly.
“I certainly hope so,” Michael said.
Kirsten was wrapping as if her life depended on this board game being covered. He better not be looking at me, she thought. Kirsten don’t you dare give him the satisfaction of looking at him to see if he’s looking at you.
She peeked. He wagged his eyebrows at her. He was the man least likely to ever inspire a figurine. Imagine. Love’s Little Skinny Dipping. Unfortunately she could imagine it, and all too clearly, but it wasn’t Harriet and Smedley she was imagining it with. She closed her eyes, conjured a picture of raw squid, felt the heat recede.
But when she opened her eyes, he was looking at her with knowing eyes. She could see he was making assumptions about her! And very personal ones, too. No matter that it happened to be true. In fact, that just made it all worse.
There it came. She could feel it. Squid, squid, squid. Too late. The heat moving up her face would not be stopped. He delighted in tormenting her, in making her blush. And he was good at it, too.
That’s what she hated most about him.
“Oh, give me a damned tricycle,” she said.
“That’s the Christmas spirit,” Michael said approvingly.
CHAPTER FIVE
Twenty-five days until Christmas…
MICHAEL BREWSTER could never have seen this one coming. Christmas wrapping had become the bane of his existence.
Ever since he’d insisted on wrapping the tricycles, every odd shaped and overly sized gift in the place was presented to him. Three-foot teddy bears, snowboards, horses-on-springs, they were all his department now.
Currently, he was scratching his head over a pink child’s two-wheeler bicycle with training wheels.
A group of people so different had probably rarely been assembled at the same table, he thought as he settled into the task. Black, white, old, young, thin, fat, male, female.
And then there was Kirsten. Her commitment to looking as unappealing as was possible seemed to be relaxing over the last few days. Today she had on a cute pair of hip-hugging jeans, and a zip-up hooded top over a T-shirt that looked like it fit. If he was not mistaken, her lips had the tiniest bit of shine to them.
He didn’t even want to contemplate what that meant, but it did seem strange to him, the more he got to know her, that she was not taken. She could be intensely funny, she was cute, she was intelligent, and as a complete bonus, she had a fine figure.
Of course, she had a tendency to be a bit too serious and she did have the weird interest in those awful figurines. After Lulu had let it slip that day, he had looked up A Little Puppy Love on the Internet. After spending a hopeless evening sorting through Donny Osmond songs, and dog kennels, he’d taken Lulu aside and gotten the true scoop—plus parted with twenty bucks toward Kirsten’s gift from the volunteers.
Then it had been back to the Internet, because even though Lulu had assured him that the volunteers had A Little Puppy Love covered, he’d been intrigued about why Kirsten didn’t want him to know what she really wanted for Christmas.
In no time flat, Michael had been introduced to the whole horrible world of Little in Love . Smedley, with that smarmy expression on his face, and that toothpick slenderness was cartoonish and insipid, and Harriet had had the same vapid, unchanging expression on her face since 1957.
He hoped Kirsten’s interest really was about the puppy in that particular figurine, since she couldn’t have a real one, poor girl, but his antenna were up. The next day he couldn’t help but notice she had a Love’s Little collectible in her office called Love in a Little Canoe . Worse, she appeared to have a catalog, that she quickly snapped shut anytime he was around.
But despite that enormous fault, the fact she liked those idealistic and unreal 3-D portraits of what love should look like he truly couldn’t figure it out. Why would a girl like her be alone?
Alone.
He glanced around the table one more time and realized that was the common denominator among all the volunteers.
Lulu was separated, Mrs. Henderson recently widowed, Mrs. Jacobs had lost her husband long ago, Mr. Temple had never been married. He knew they all had plans for the big day—families or friends they would be with on Christmas—but that, just like him, they were looking for a way to get through it. Each person in this room had looked beyond themselves to find someone who needed . Who was in more pain than they were.
Here behind the doors of the Secret Santa Society, a family had been born.
And he had been accepted into that family with open arms.
He had a sense of epiphany, of having a mission here that was larger than providing his brawn, larger than being placed in charge of wrapping the bulkier packages, larger than the impossible task of trying to unearth a Christmas Eve elf. It was larger than his own healing.
It was larger, even, than looking at Kirsten’s lips, and larger than thinking of new and innovative ways to make her show him her tummy or blush.
Though since he was thinking of that blush, he decided to stare at her newly glossed lips until she noticed he was staring.
She did. “Chapped,” she told him, not a blush in sight.
She was getting just a little too good at turning the tables on him!
“If you could have anything you wanted for Christmas,” he asked, trying to let her know how absolutely serious he was by scowling at her playful expression, “what would it be?”
“Every kid in this neighborhood to get a gift delivered and an elf,” Kirsten said. Trust her to ignore his scowl, and to move it away from the personal.
“I wasn’t asking philosophically. I meant materially.”
“That figures,” she said, but she softened it by grinning at him, showing him that flash of her that was full of mischief and spunk. It wasn’t really lipstick, but he didn’t think it was lip balm, either. Gloss.
“Mrs. Hennie-Pennie,” he said, ignoring Kirsten since she had decided her latest dance step would be the sidestep, “What about you?”
Mrs. Henderson was pensive. Finally, she said, “You know what I’d like for Christmas? German chocolates. My Addie sent me home some when he was stationed over there. Before we even got married. Then every year, I don’t know how, he got me some. They come in a thin box, called Merci—” she pronounced it murky “—a French name for German chocolates. I swear I wake up with a longing for that taste in my mouth, sometimes. Thinking of him. Missing him.”
They were all very quiet, and then Lulu broke the silence.
“Me, I want one of them home spa things you put your feet in, and warm water massages your tired tootsies. Don’t that sound like heaven? And not nearly as much trouble as a man.” She laughed robustly, and Kirsten joined in with more enthusiasm than he thought the comment warranted.
As their laughter faded, his mission clarified suddenly, he could see it as if a light shone on it, brilliant as that star the Wise Men had followed.
He was here to be the secret Santa for the Secret Santa Society. He could get each of these goodhearted volunteers, who did so much and e
xpected so little, the Christmas gifts of their dreams.
Mrs. Henderson could have a crate of murky chocolates, and he could get Lulu a weekend at the best spa in Michigan. No, maybe he’d send her to that luxury one in Arizona. His mother had kept a brochure and he’d found it, unexpectedly, in with the pizza menus. He liked the thought of that—Lulu going to a place his mother had quietly dreamed of, and never once mentioned.
Mrs. Jacobs wished her son who was overseas could come home with the grandchild she had yet to see. Michael took mental notes as each woman spoke, he could feel the warmth growing in him as if somebody kept cranking the thermostat in this place.
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