See? She had allowed herself to believe . The part of herself that Kirsten was most afraid of was that she was a hopeless dreamer. How could that lead anywhere but to a broken heart? Her certainty of the night before—that she should stop waiting, and go after what she wanted, faded.
Seven days until Christmas…
“Do you want to see something cute?” Lulu asked. She put her finger to her lips and led Kirsten to the back room.
There, squeezed onto a spot on the back of the sleigh was Michael, fast asleep. He’d told Kirsten he had a job he had to do before Christmas. Urgent. Still, he managed to drop by here every night to see what they needed done. Kirsten wasn’t entirely fooled. He didn’t want her walking to her car by herself.
Which charmed her. Especially since he always took her hand, sometimes blew on it in that way that warmed, not just her hand, but her heart.
Twice, he’d followed her home and come in and played cards, but when she won she knew the poor guy was beyond exhaustion.
As she watched him sleep, she was overwhelmed with tenderness for him. She felt overwhelmed with longing. And she felt as much confusion as she had ever felt in her whole life.
She hated this roller coaster of emotion she was riding. She needed to know. She needed answers.
Taking a deep breath, she hiked up her skirt, climbed on the sleigh, squeezed into the tiny soft spot he had found.
And then she kissed him.
He woke up slowly, beautifully. She smiled at his groggy, grumpy expression, took his lips again.
And he answered her. His lips took hers, in quest. Searching. Both of them searching for a truth that was bigger than they were, bigger than all the pain they had been through, bigger than fairy tales.
She allowed herself to wonder what it would be like to wake up beside him each day of real life. It wouldn’t be about ball gowns, or a maiden being rescued by a gallant knight on horseback.
What would it be about? Would they read the newspapers together in bed? Drink from a single coffee cup? Jump in leaves? Walk hand in hand? Burn the toast? Make babies?
The thought of those ordinary everyday moments caused her to feel the most extraordinary warmth in her heart, the warmth that came with the certainty that she had found an everyday kind of prince.
A certainty that it would be good to always feel something this real.
“Hey,” he said, and touched her cheek, “you’re blushing.”
“I know,” she said. She didn’t even try to think of fish. “That’s what I do. I blush.”
“Are you thinking naughty thoughts?” he teased.
“No!” She laughed. “Okay. Maybe.”
He looked at her sleepily, as if he was watching the sun come up instead of her cheeks turn pink. Something flashed in his eyes…heated, sensual.
“This would be so much easier if you were a bad girl,” he sighed.
“You could teach me. Look at how quickly I picked up on Ninety-Nine.”
“Nope. Sorry. I’m turning over a new leaf. What time is it?”
She frowned. A moment like this shouldn’t be followed by a question like that. Time? “It’s just after midnight. Everyone has gone home,” she said. Oh, goodness, did that sound like a blunt invitation to a more romantic moment? Necessary, since he seemed intent on being a gentleman, of all things! The blush deepened. He had to get it. But he didn’t.
“After midnight?” The sleep chased from his face. He put her away from him, scrambled to sit up, ran a hand through his hair and got to his feet. “Hell, I’ve got to go.”
Where did anyone have to go after midnight?
He paused, looked at her, smiled, warm and lazy and sexy. “Hard as it is,” he said, “I’ve got to go, Kirsten.” He leaned over and kissed her much too lightly, much too casually. There was regret in his eyes, but not enough to make him stay.
She watched him disappear, sat up crankily, clambered off the sleigh and smoothed the wrinkles out of another new dress, not one made for trysts on the back of a sleigh.
What she hated most about Michael Brewster was that she loved him enough to give fairy tales another chance.
Just a few short weeks ago, her life hadn’t been like this: all topsy-turvy, her stomach doing a constant roller-coaster ride. Just a few weeks ago, everything had been predictable and she had been in control.
The problem with a man like Michael was that she was never going to be in charge of the script! Could she live with that?
She wasn’t at all sure. But she was sure she could never go back to being content with what she had before. Never. And that’s what she hated about love. It wrecked everything.
CHAPTER TEN
Christmas Eve…
MICHAEL BREWSTER felt drunk with exhaustion. Next time he wouldn’t be quite so cocky about thinking he could make over an aging building that had been abandoned and neglected on such an impossibly tight time frame. He’d taken on a sixmonth job—and given himself about nine days to do it in.
Now it was crunch time. Still, it was almost done, a miracle of community spirit and generosity. As soon as the Santa Claus sleigh had delivered its cargo tonight, he’d get back over there and make sure the building was ready for its Christmas morning reveal to the neighborhood. And to Kirsten.
What humbled him were the volunteers who had gathered to make that reading center a reality for their community. They came slowly at first, and then in droves. Young men and young women too old for Santa. They came even though he could pay them nothing. They came even though he was becoming a tyrant who drove them to their limits.
His judgments about this neighborhood were smashed. These kids wanted desperately to work, they were eager to learn every skill he could teach them: tiling, plumbing, painting, carpentry, cement work—they shirked at nothing. Even the girls picked up sledgehammers and circular saws without hesitation and without complaint. Still, things took more time when the labor was eager but unskilled.
But the strangest thing of all had happened. The Grant Baker Reading Center had started as a gift to someone else.
A gift for Kirstie. A gift to give her back her trust in life, a gift that tried to tell her if people kept their spirits strong, they could make good come from bad.
But somehow it had become so much more. It was a gift to each young person who came through that door asking nothing, giving everything he had to give.
But it was Michael himself who seemed to be receiving the greatest gift of all. He acknowledged his life had not come back to him the day he had been pulled from the sea. No, it had begun to come back to him when he had gone through the doors of the Secret Santa Society.
He had begun to breathe again, to laugh, to feel. He actually got cold. He’d had to buy a winter jacket, and have his furnace at the house serviced. All of those things proof that he lived, finally.
But living wasn’t enough.
To go to a woman like Kirstie, with your heart in your hands, and ask her if she’d be willing to take the biggest chance of all, he realized he had to do something more than be just living.
Days away from a new year, he finally knew what his future held. Personally, he hoped it held a little house, and a beautiful gray-eyed woman and babies. He hoped it held Christmas mornings of kids getting up too early, and ripping paper and squealing with excitement and delight. He hoped it held moments when the last gift was the most important…
That was why this work he’d found became so important. It made him worthy in a way he had not been before.
The man he had been before had been easygoing and charming. He’d loved good times, tailgate parties, trips with his brother and the guys, football games, gatherings with his close-knit family. He had wanted nothing beyond what that world had given him, nothing beyond his own contentment. His world had been, frankly and unapologetically, all about him.
He had been allergic to the word commitment.
And then along came Kirstie, his polar opposite in so many ways. Her whole world was abo
ut others, helping, changing the world, trying to make it safe, filling dark corners with love even while she tried to convince herself she did not believe in love.
Somewhere along the way she had forgotten she had her own needs and desires. She had become afraid to even ask.
She needed to become more selfish, he needed to become more selfless. The work he was doing now made him feel worthy of the love of that woman, worthy to become a father who would teach his children to be citizens of a bigger world.
He had stumbled onto a way to be more than he was before tragedy had touched him with his icy fingers.
The opening of the Grant Baker Reading Center tomorrow was only the very beginning. He was going to use some more of that money—insurance money, crab money, money from his parents’ assets and his brother’s—all that money that had become his when he had survived them. Finally the money was a blessing instead of a curse, finally he knew exactly how to use it.
Not for plasma televisions or cars or clothes or trips or a fridge filled to the brim with beer.
Something bigger. He was going to buy the vacant building across the street from this one. It looked to be in even worse shape, which was a good thing when you were teaching young people how to tear something down, and then how to build it back up. A lovely irony that in the process, these kids, who had been torn down by poverty and lack of opportunity and poor education, were also built back up.
That new building would become The Brewster Family Memorial Skills Training center, and these young people so full of restlessness and dreams were going to learn everything he could teach them. The things he didn’t know about, he would bring in others to teach. He had found out in the last two weeks he was a surprisingly good teacher—particularly with people so surprisingly eager to learn.
But all that was the future.
Right now, he had a different job to do. He just wasn’t sure what it was. A crowd of volunteers was in front of the Secret Santa Society office, loading the last of the gifts onto the flat deck sleigh. Lulu was settling her bulk in Santa’s chair. Kirsten had asked him to meet her here, told him she needed him, that he would have the most important job of the evening.
But where was Kirsten? Then his mouth fell open.
Since when had elves looked like that? They were supposed to be small and green and grumpy!
Kirsten came out the Secret Santa Society door in an elf costume that ended midthigh. Her legs, in bright green tights, looked like they went on forever. The outfit, which on closer inspection was a plain burlap sack, dyed and belted in the middle, was absolutely the sexiest thing he’d ever seen her wear, up to and including that magnificent red dress.
Kirsten Morrison looked like she had been born to be Santa’s elf.
And wasn’t that what she was? The person who did all the work behind the magic, the person who would be back at it on January 3, when everybody else was content not to think about Christmas for another year.
She was the one who glued it all together.
“There you are,” she said, and came bustling over. “Here. Quick. Go get changed.”
“I’ve been missing you,” he said.
Ah, the beginning of that little blush.
“I look horrible,” she said, “Don’t look at me like that!”
“Like what?” He folded his arms over his chest, leaned back, looked at her like that even harder.
“You know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Like you’re going to take me behind the building and ravage me,” she whispered.
He realized he couldn’t hide one single thing about how he felt about her. “That’s exactly what I want to do,” he said.
“What kind of person wants to ravage a frog?” she asked, then grinned. “Oh, I know, another frog!”
Suspiciously he looked in the bag she had handed him. An elf costume. Extra large!
“I’m not wearing tights!” he said.
“I couldn’t find any to fit you. Be a sport. Remember that first day, Michael? You said you’d be an elf.”
“A guy will say anything when he’s trying to win the girl. Do anything.”
“Oh, goodie, go get changed!”
He sighed, called to Lulu, “Hey, strike up the ravaging music. It’s Good to be Green.”
He wanted to wait until tomorrow to make this declaration, but she was just showing too much leg. His legendary discipline evaporated.
“Froggie,” he said, “I have to tell you something. I love you.”
There it was out. Her face turned the same color as Lulu’s suit.
He snagged her wrist, and pulled her close to him. He kissed her. And she kissed back.
He came up for air because all the volunteers were clapping and stamping their feet and catcalling.
He bowed. She stepped back from him. Unless he was mistaken her face was a shade or two darker than the Santa suit now.
“Behave,” she growled without an ounce of conviction. “There’s my sister and nephew.”
“Uh-hmm.”
“This is my sister, Becky,” she said. “Becky, Michael.”
Becky was also dressed in one of the green elf outfits, though she looked like she was being much more sporting about it than her sister. The two sisters were very much alike in looks, though Becky was obviously the more outgoing of the two, and it showed, even though they were dressed identically.
Becky took his hand, did not let on once that he had arranged her tickets and accommodations for her. Her eyes met his, full of knowing. She knew he loved her sister. Why did her sister have to be so difficult?
Because that’s the way she was. Difficult, challenging, the kind of complicated girl a guy could spend the next hundred or so years with and never stop being surprised.
He bet, when she was ninety, he’d still be able to make her blush.
There was a whirring sound, an electric wheelchair.
“And this is my nephew, Grant. Now, quick, go get changed.”
Michael shook Grant’s hand, and then hustled off to get changed. The outfit wasn’t nearly as bad as she could have made it: just a green sack that fit over his regular shirt and jeans, and a green hat with fur—but he didn’t think it made him look much like an elf!
He looked at himself in the mirror and smiled. The things a man would do for love. Not just love of her, but a larger love, a love of his community, a love for his neighbors, even the ones he did not know by name and had never met.
A moment later, he boarded the sleigh, and realized he would not have missed this for the world, this moment when all those months, weeks, hours, minutes of hard work and planning paid off.
This moment when Kirsten became an emissary of pure love. He had never seen her quite like this: shining with joy and purpose, as if the holiness of the season had chosen to arrive through her. She may not have been playing Santa, but she was Santa—she perfectly personified the spirit of the season, healing coming from hardship and love triumphing over transgression.
This had all been rehearsed and double rehearsed. Santa read the name, the elves went into the huge storage bins on the flat deck that were organized by street, and handed the parcels down to volunteers who delivered them to the eagerly waiting children who lined the streets.
The streets, normally so empty looking and desolate were filling up with children and their families—mothers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, fathers, grandfathers, sisters, brothers.
The streets had been cleaned of snow, so Grant was able to be part of the system that got packages from the sleigh to the curbside.
In the crowd, Michael saw the same miracle that he saw in Kirsten’s shining face. He saw tears mixed with smiles. He listened to the shrieks of children as Santa called their names, the looks of wonder and hope on small faces as they looked at those wrapped packages, hugged them to themselves in anticipation of tomorrow morning.
Amanda Watson’s name was called near the beginning. She was tiny for six, her hair lovingly done i
n beautiful corn rows. Her eyes opened very wide when her name was called by Santa.
Michael found her huge box, jumped off the sleigh to deliver it personally. The tiny girl stared. Her hand crept into the young man’s beside her. She turned and looked up at him, said in a tiny, disbelieving voice, “For me?”
She didn’t have a hope of lifting it but luckily the man she was with—an older brother or an uncle whom Michael recognized as one of the young men who had come to work every day—lifted the box easily to his shoulder. That young man’s gaze locked on Michael. The little girl was dancing around him, tugging on his free hand and squealing, and yet he remained still.
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