Cara Colter

by Their Christmas Wish Come True

  Just a few short weeks ago, he had been a man who could not feel temperature. Now it felt as if he was going to have to rip his shirt off any minute, he was so warm, so on fire.

  He could just imagine Kirsten’s eyes going all round—and hopefully awed—if he did that.

  “What about you?” he asked her, finally, when each of those women had explored her Christmas fantasies thoroughly. “Kirsten?”

  “I told you,” she said uncomfortably. “An elf.”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “Okay,” she said sharply. “Serious. A dancing hippo with a pink tutu.”

  Everyone laughed, except him. He realized she had deflected his question. She didn’t want anyone to know what she wanted for Christmas.

  “I know you like those figurines,” he said. “Little in Love.” It actually hurt to say it, it sounded so stupid.

  “How do you know that?” she snapped.

  “Well, Lulu mentioned it the other night, before you shut her up by threatening to cut her throat. How’s that for Christmas spirit?”

  She was glaring at him, but silent.

  “You have one of those things in your office. And a catalog.”

  So, if she said which one she wanted, instead of sitting there with a mulish look on her face, Michael figured he’d suck it up and get it for her, even though it went seriously against his grain.

  This was part of his epiphany: Christmas wasn’t about doing what made you happy, though he remembered fondly the time he and Brian had pooled their money to buy their mother a silver-plated. 22 rifle. Never once had she acted as though she was anything but delighted, and she had generously lent it to them whenever they asked for squirrel and gopher hunting.

  Kirsten, however, seemed bent on making his mission difficult.

  “I don’t want anything from you,” she said a little stiffly.

  He might have been insulted, only when he looked at her, he wondered if she wanted anything at all. Maybe—hopefully—Little in Love was just a smoke screen, something to ask for because she couldn’t think of anything else. It struck him as a strange and sad irony that this young woman, so determined to give Christmas to everyone else, somehow did not truly believe in the season. She could give but not receive.

  Except Michael Brewster made it his mission, right then and there, to find out Kirsten Morrison’s heart’s desire and to make sure she got it—whatever it was—for Christmas.

  So, he pretended he hadn’t heard her say she didn’t want anything from him. “Come on,” he chided her. “Spill it. You must want more than Love’s Little Doggy Breath, Love’s Sloppy Kiss or Love’s Little Honeymoon from Hell.”

  He was cracking up at his own cleverness when he noticed she wasn’t laughing, and realized she really did like those truly ridiculous figurines, and he’d only set his own quest to find out what she wanted back by mocking her. Should he just get her a couple of those blasted things and be done with it?

  The thought made him shudder.

  But over the next few days, it seemed the more he pursued it, even with all the sensitivity he could muster, the more determined she became not to tell him anything about herself.

  “So, Kirsten, have you thought about what you want?”

  “I was up all night thinking of nothing else.”

  He glared at her, knowing he was about to get a taste of his own mockery thrown back at him. “And?”

  “World peace,” she said, that hint of mischief again.

  “Are you running for the Miss America pageant? The stock answer.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, girl most unlikely to be Miss America.”

  “More the shame, that,” he muttered.

  “Right.”

  “No, really,” he said stubbornly, and meant both that it was a shame a girl like her would never be Miss America, and that he really wanted to know what she wanted for Christmas.

  He tried a different tack. “So, what are your hobbies, when you aren’t here?”

  Not subtle enough. She smiled at him, and he braced himself. More payback mockery coming. “I read books. B-o-o-k-s.”

  “Hey, just because I’m a dumb carpenter, doesn’t mean I’m dumb.”

  She was so green to the whole teasing thing that she spoiled it all by looking sincerely abashed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that.”

  Good. A weak moment. “I’ll forgive you if you’ll tell me.”

  For a moment, he thought he’d made headway.

  “You tell me first,” she countered. “What do you want for Christmas?”

  The question took him by surprise. What did he want for Christmas? He realized the answer was nothing. He was wealthy. Anything he wanted he could buy.

  And yet there was nothing he could buy that he wanted.

  What his heart ached for was his family. Unbidden his mind crowded with memories. The ridiculously large tree his mother insisted on every year, so big they could barely get it in the front door. The gag gift he always got from his brother. His father’s excitement about how he planned to surprise his mother.

  The highlight of Christmas morning, though Michael had not recognized it at the time, was not his own pile of gifts, but the last gift of the morning. His father waited until every other parcel was opened, and then with great ceremony, he would hand his gift to his wife.

  Open it, Eileen, open it , his voice betraying his anxiety and his excitement that he had gotten it just right. Of course, Michael realized only now, she was a woman who could seem to love a rifle. Those big emerald earrings she’d gotten one year could not have possibly been to her taste. Another year, when they had had a particularly good take on the crab boat, there had been a diamond necklace.

  Always, even when the year had been lean, that final gift was something foolishly extravagant. Michael remembered his mother’s mouth forming that “O” of surprise, her eyes filling with tears, her looking at his father with such tenderness, such tenderness…

  “Michael, what is it?” He came back to the here and now, to find himself being regarded with gentle concern. Kirsten’s hand was on his wrist, reminding him how much he liked her touch, reminding him he wanted to dance with her again…

  “Nothing,” he said, and then had to get away from that look in her eyes, any way he could. “What was the question?”

  He was fighting for time to regain his composure.

  “What do you want for Christmas?” She was watching him way too carefully, her hand was still on his wrist. How could so much strength come from such a tiny hand? How could such a light touch fire such yearning in him?

  “A beautiful woman,” he said, wanting to annoy her, and hopefully make her blush.

  Only she didn’t. She regarded him steadily. “Santa will have trouble getting that in your sock,” she said.

  She did remove her hand, though.

  “He can leave her on the doorstep. Your turn.”

  “If the moon’s made out of blue cheese, I want a piece of it.”

  “Look, for such a simple question, you are really having trouble with the answer.”

  “You, too!”

  “One. Simple. Answer.”

  “I’m complicated,” she said sweetly.

  “No kidding.”

  Well, playing Santa for her might mean playing a little dirty then. The next time she left to run an errand, he slipped into her office.

  Just as he suspected, it was a Little in Love catalog that was quickly stuffed into her top drawer every time he came anywhere near her office. It was worse than he thought. A Special Collectors’ Catalog. One page was pathetically wellworn. Knight in Shining Armor. Michael thought it was possibly the worst of the Little in Love collection to date.

  The page informed him that piece was a limited edition. Only two thousand of them would be cast and Special Collectors, whatever the heck that was, would have first dibs on every single one of them. He had the sinking feeling it was not simply a sales pitch that Knight in Shining Armor was expected
to sell out within days of being offered. He flipped to the front of the catalog, checked the date. Which meant it was probably already sold out.

  It made his head hurt that two thousand of these were going to be released on the world. It made his head hurt that everything she wanted was always difficult. The elf was proving impossible and now this.

  Wasn’t this something that someone much older than her should collect anyway? He pictured an old crone of about ninety, with cats crawling all over her lap.

  Michael was willing to bet not a single collector of Little in Love was a man. Because men simply did not think like this.

  “Knight in Shining Armor ,” he scoffed. Real men were more for nights of sweating amour. No wonder she didn’t want to tell him what she wanted for Christmas. It was an embarrassment to her, as well it should be. Still, his Christmas list was now complete. He knew what she wanted, and nothing was impossible. He felt optimistic, happy even.

  But the thing about happiness was that you couldn’t trust it. And he was about to close her desk drawer when his gaze fell on something else. Slowly he picked up a file marked Impossible Dreams. Kirsten’s impossible dreams?

  Reluctantly he flipped open the file, and found out some things were impossible after all.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Kirsten asked, incensed. She was not even sure why she asked. It was quite evident that Michael was quite at home in her seat, in her office, reading her papers.

  He looked up at her, as if he had no idea he shouldn’t have made himself at home at her desk.

  It was just wrong that he could make her feel uptight when he was the one in the wrong!

  “Kirstie,” he said, “is your heart broken?”

  Her breath stopped. What had he found in her desk that had revealed her deepest secrets to him?

  Yes, her heart was broken, and he could pester her constantly about what she wanted for Christmas, but she knew the truth. She wanted something very badly, and she knew she could not have it.

  Oh, sure, she would like Knight in Shining Armor , it might distract her from what she really wanted for a week or two.

  Because what she really wanted, her deepest secret, was that she wanted everything to be the way it had been before her nephew had been crippled, before Kent had let down the family so badly. She hoped, in some secret place, that Kent and Becky would get back together. Despite her mother and father’s love dying, despite the treachery of James, despite Kent and Becky’s breakup, she still wanted, in her most secret place, to believe.

  A Christmas reconciliation would be the absolute best, a miracle just like the ones you saw in the Christmas movies. Had she written that down somewhere for prying Michael to see?

  “I don’t appreciate you being in my office, going through my things,” she said tightly.

  “No need to act as if it’s your underwear drawer.” He was watching her intently, narrowly. She wanted to turn around and run from what she saw in his eyes.

  He would not rest until he knew the truth about her, the whole truth, things she had probably not even totally admitted to herself.

  “It’s you,” he said suddenly, slowly. “It’s you who is in the worst pain.”

  Her heart stopped. He did know then!

  “Because of this,” he said. “Holy cow, this stuff is hard to handle.”

  She could tell by the way he was looking at her he’d unearthed her secret. That despite it all—despite being surrounded by people who cared for her, despite bringing joy into a world too filled with sadness—she barely made it through this season.

  Her nephew, Grant, had been hit by a car on Christmas Day.

  Michael held up the file, and then she blinked. She saw he didn’t really know her secret at all. He’d unearthed the Impossible Dreams file. For a moment, when she thought he knew, had she felt truly sorry, or just a tiny bit relieved, as if her burdens were not going to be so heavy to carry? Because she would not have to be so alone with the impossibility of her fantasy of everything working out somehow, someway.

  “Dear Santa,” he read out loud, “my brother got shot in the head. He needs his brain back. Love, Geoff.”

  “Now you know the reason I can barely get through Christmas,” she whispered.

  It felt like a lie, a terrible lie, even if these children with their impossible dreams had become so linked to her fate.

  This was how she was trying to fix everything but in her most honest moments she knew it wasn’t working. Still, she was not ready to tell Michael the whole truth. And maybe she never would be. He might think he could do the impossible, but she knew no one could set back the clock.

  “Dear Santa,” he read the next letter, “My mom diet last yer. Is she in hefen?” He swore under his breath.

  “Michael, don’t.”

  He glared at her, read the next one and the next one. “At least Disneyland and sports stars are somewhat possible. What are we going to do about this, Kirsten?” he said.

  We?

  “Impossible dreams,” he said when she was silent. “We can’t let those kids think their dreams are impossible.”

  There was that seductive we again.

  “One of them asks to go to heaven to see his mommy!” He had to accept that some dreams were impossible. That was life.

  “Okay, that one’s a little tougher.”

  “And we can’t send anyone to Disneyland.”

  “Why not?” he asked stubbornly.

  “Michael, if we did that, word would get around. Just ask Santa and you, too, can be on your way to Disneyland. Next year that’s the only request we would get. Even if we could arrange it, just once, it would lead to a thousand other disappointments.”

  “You’ve got the weight of the whole world on your shoulders, don’t you?”

  She hated this—that he was making her think her own impossible dream was not so impossible after all, that he was making her think maybe love was real, after all, even in the face of the fact she’d seen so much evidence that it could fall apart in a blink.

  And that’s the last thing she wanted to feel. She didn’t even want to have a shred of belief that impossible things could happen.

  Hope, the most dangerous thing of all.

  She’d taken Michael on: told him she knew how he would get through this. She’d invited him into her own little family, her safe place.

  Now she was sorry, because it was not feeling quite so safe anymore. He was rattling her. She had wanted to fix his world, but she had not expected hers would be so challenged in the process.

  He was making her ache for things she didn’t want to believe in: strong arms to hold her in the night, someone to talk to, someone to believe in, someone to share the burden.

  He was making her long for things she thought she had wisely given up on: a desire to be safe, protected, loved, looked after, secure. A desire to be able to trust again: the world, men, herself .

  He was making her thirst for a man who would push away her barriers and make the wild side of her sing. He was making her want to taste passion in the form of his lips and his skin against her own, his eyes hot on her.

  She tried to remind herself how angry she had been when she’d first walked in and seen he had made himself at home at her desk so that she could push him away.

  But looking at the expression on his face as he read those letters, she could summon no anger. How could he always turn everything around? Now she was even more under his spell.

  Kirsten could tell by the grim look of absolute determination on Michael Brewster’s face that he didn’t intend to accept that anything was impossible.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Eighteen days until Christmas…

  “ONE more thing before we lock up,” Michael said. “Kirstie, I’ve got something to show you.” He tried for a casual tone, but he knew how his father had felt all those Christmas mornings when he had kept that special Christmas surprise until last. Not that this was her Christmas surprise—he was still working on that�
�but it was a nice warm-up for it.

  “Lock up?” she said. “I don’t want to lock up. I want to stand here and marvel at this.”

  He laughed. “It’s nearly midnight.”

  Still, she walked around the “sleigh” one more time. “It’s the best it’s ever been,” she declared.