by Lisa Plumley
“Who else, then?” Danielle demanded to know, wheeling around. “Because I sure as hell never suggested you could use my kids to redeem yourself with Moosby’s board of directors.”
“I know that. I never meant for this to happen.”
Danielle crossed her arms again. She stared him down.
He had no choice but to forge onward. “A lot of people saw them,” Jason said in his most soothing tone. “On the Internet.”
“On the Internet?”
He nodded. “The sleigh-ride footage from The Christmas House absolutely blew up on Moosby’s social media channels.”
Her tone turned frostier. “Social media channels?”
Evidently, Danielle’s fury was the ice-cold kind. But now that Jason had begun his confession, he had to keep going.
“Stock prices soared. Sales skyrocketed. According to Chip, you and I and the kids were some kind of crazy media cross between England’s royal wedding and the Kardashians.”
Danielle paused while she took in the significance of that statement. Then, “We were all on the Internet?” she asked.
Her icy, excruciatingly exact tone concerned him. Deeply.
It occurred to Jason that Chip had done a real shit job of ratting him out, if Danielle didn’t know about these details.
“It’s not that bad. It’s actually kind of sweet.” To prove it, Jason whipped out his phone. He navigated to one of the online photos. “I tried to make it stop,” he assured her. “But it was already out there. Hashtag sleighride was a bona fide meme.”
Danielle looked at that photo. Rapidly, she thumbed through several more. She gritted her teeth. “Sort of like hashtag truelove?”
Belatedly, he remembered what Mark and Crystal had said at The Big Foot Bar. Danielle was smart. Of course she’d connect the dots quickly. “I guess the ‘social media monkeys’ had to concoct a variety of hashtags to keep up interest. They wove together videos and photos into a ‘true love’ storyline.”
“A storyline?”
Jason didn’t like the glacial sound of that. Rapidly, he pocketed his phone. Out of sight, out of mind? Now that he’d come clean, he dared to hope that everything would be all right.
“That’s what they called it,” Jason admitted. “But it was real for me.” He tipped up her chin, trying to make Danielle look at him. “I hope it was real for you, too.”
Damningly, she fell completely silent.
“If you’ll just let me explain,” Jason began, “I—”
“I think you’ve said enough. More than enough.”
No. She had to let him explain. He’d been counting on that.
Especially now, when it really, truly mattered.
“I can tell you how it all happened. It’s not that bad.”
“It’s pretty bad.” Danielle broke away from him. She paced a foot away and then back again, her reindeer headband bobbing, offering an incongruously whimsical counterpoint to the situation. “You went behind my back. You used me and my kids for your own gain with the board. You betrayed me—”
“It wasn’t like that.” Jason shook his head.
“—and you made me look like a fool!” Danielle threw up her hand, then shot him an infuriated look. “I told everyone how I felt about you. Everyone! That night at The Big Foot Bar—”
“It doesn’t matter what other people think.” Jason ignored the people nearby, the carols drifting in the air, the stupid Santa hat on his head. He couldn’t believe she refused to listen to him. “It never did. You’re you. I’m me. Together, we—”
“There is no ‘together.’ Not for us. Not anymore.”
“Not online, you mean.” He couldn’t bring himself to believe that Danielle meant anything else. “I know how you feel. Believe me, I do. I’ll try harder to make Moosby’s stop,” Jason promised. “I’ll talk to the social media people. I’ll shut down the damn channels!” But first . . . “I just need you to know—”
Danielle cut him off. “Don’t try to explain. Not now. Not about this. Not when you’re not even sorry.”
“I am sorry! I swear.” Hadn’t he already said that? In his turmoil, he couldn’t remember. Desperately, he reached for her. “You listened to me before, about Bethany. Please listen now.”
At that, Danielle gave a wry chuckle. “I’ve heard too much already.” Her bleak gaze met his. “I’m not as gullible as you think I am, Jason.”
“No. I meant everything I said to you.” He couldn’t believe this was all going so wrong. With a lump in his throat, Jason reached for her hand. “When I said I loved you—”
“It barely rang true.” Awkwardly, Danielle wrenched her gloved hand from his. She lifted her chin. “Given your pathetic performance at the bar when you told me that, I can’t believe anybody bought into that hashtag truelove meme. Least of all me.”
“I bought into it,” Jason told her one last time. “I did.”
“Well,” Danielle told him, “you’re the only one.” She drew in a breath, glanced around the square, then straightened her shoulders. In an impressive display of either fortitude or good acting, she looked unfeelingly at him. “Please have your things out of my house by the end of the Christmas Carol Crawl. We’ll all be out for a while yet. It ought to be easy for you to—”
“Easy?” A harsh laugh escaped him. “Nothing about this is easy.”
“If you expect me to feel sorry for you after all you’ve done—” Danielle broke off. He could have sworn tears glimmered in her eyes. “Nobody’s perfect. But you—you had to know how I’d feel about you going behind my back. First Mark, now you—”
That was the last straw. Jason didn’t want to hear about her lousy ex-husband. He knew Danielle had trouble trusting people. But it was all supposed to have been different with him.
With them, together.
But it wasn’t. Now it never would be.
“You’ll tell the kids good-bye for me?” His throat ached as he said it. “I don’t want them to think I just disappeared.”
“Maybe it would be better for them if you did.” Danielle closed her eyes. “Just . . . go, all right? Go back to California and forget about Kismet. It’s better that way. For everyone.”
Except him, Jason knew. Because he really did love it there. Because of Danielle. Because of Aiden and Zach and even Karlie. He knew he could have brought her around eventually.
Now he’d never get the chance.
“Hey, I’m already gone,” Jason said. There was no point staying where he wasn’t wanted. If all he had left was his pride, he knew he might as well preserve it. So he held up his hand in a stoic good-bye, turned around, and walked away.
As Jason left her, Danielle managed to hold her tears in check. At least for a few crucial seconds, she did. As Jason was swallowed up into the crowd, a sob finally burst free.
Quickly, she stifled it. She swabbed her cheek with her gloved hand, then sucked in a steadying breath.
She couldn’t just cry in the middle of the town square.
At least, she consoled herself, she’d managed not to be the pathetic dumpee this time. Unlike with Mark, she’d managed to be tough with Jason. She’d acted as if she didn’t mind having her heart torn in two. Then stomped on. Then steamrollered and left to wither like a cast-off Christmas tree on New Year’s Day.
Truthfully, she did mind. She minded everything. She minded that Jason had betrayed her, and she minded that she’d let him do it. She minded that she’d stupidly trusted him, and she minded that she’d allowed her children to become close to him.
She minded that she still wanted him, in spite of it all.
For someone who prided herself on being smart, Danielle knew, she could be pretty damn dense when it came to love. Just as with Mark and her broken-up marriage, she’d been too slow to see the signs, even when they were right under her nose. Thanks to her own idiocy, she’d gotten burned. Again. Probably forever.
Maybe she’d done a few less-than-aboveboard things too, Danielle knew as she
wrenched a tissue from her purse. But next to Jason’s treachery, her own promotion-related maneuverings, divorce-payback goofiness, and sexual shenanigans were small potatoes. Compared with Jason’s willingness to sell her out to the Moosby’s board—along with her children!—so he could make a good impression, everything she’d done was laughably trivial.
Well, everything except her inventory manipulation, of course. But weirdly enough, she’d dodged a bullet there. Thanks to Chip’s ruthless approach to toy retailing, she’d actually been rewarded for the most dishonest thing she’d ever done.
Well . . . maybe the second most dishonest thing, Danielle admitted to herself reluctantly. Because if she was truthful, the most dishonest thing she’d ever done was to claim she’d never believed Jason cared about her . . . followed closely by saying it would be better for all of them if he went back to L.A.
Neither of those things were true.
She couldn’t have borne it if he’d known it, though.
She didn’t want anyone to know it. That’s why Danielle knew she couldn’t stand around moping. She had children to take care of, Christmas carols to sing . . . a public façade to protect. After all that had happened—so publicly—during her divorce, she’d be damned if she’d play the victim again now. So Danielle squared her shoulders, adjusted her reindeer antler headband, and headed to the other side of the square where Gigi and Henry were entertaining her children—in between tossing her curious looks.
Eventually, she’d get over this. Somehow.
She had to. Because without hope, all she had was her pride. And even though pride couldn’t snuggle with her at night, wake her with kisses in the morning, and make her laugh during the day the way Jason had, it could damn well keep her neighbors from looking at her with pitying eyes . . . all over again.
If that same sense of pride could have somehow kept her from wishing things were different with Jason . . . well, it would have been all she needed. Almost.
Jason nearly walked right past Chip Larsen. He was too bereft, too confused, too heartbroken to pay much attention to the crowds of people he pushed past on his way to Danielle’s house to pack up his things. But then he heard . . .
“Wow, Hamilton. Small-town life must not agree with you.” Chip leaned away from the window of an antiques shop and came toward him. He had the gall to grin. “You look like shit.”
“Yeah. Seeing you has that effect on me.” Jason delivered him a crushing look. “You just had to tell her, didn’t you?”
“Tell Ms. Sharpe? About the social media stuff?” Chip pretended innocence. “I didn’t tell her. You did that, buddy.”
“I’m not your buddy. Plus, screw you, Chip. I know you told her, because—” Suddenly reconsidering things, Jason broke off.
Haven’t you talked to him? Danielle had asked earlier, referring to Chip. Didn’t he . . . show you anything?
He didn’t have to show me anything. I already knew, Jason had volunteered. It was me. I’m the one who sent that footage.
But he and Danielle hadn’t been talking about the same footage. There was other footage somewhere—something Chip had shown Danielle that had had nothing to do with #sleighride.
Jason was the one who’d whipped out his damn phone and, in an effort to make her feel better, shown her the photos himself.
“Because?” Chip wheedled in a leading tone.
“You bastard.” Jason shook his head. “You knew I’d think you and Danielle were talking about hashtag sleighride. That’s why you looked straight at me while you were talking with Danielle earlier.” He’d seen Chip watching him while he’d been making arrangements for Henry and Gigi to babysit Karlie and Aiden. “You wanted to make sure I saw you. So I’d have to tell her.”
“It’s more believable that way. Coming from you.”
He didn’t understand. “But why? Why here? Why now? You loved all that hashtag sleighride bullshit. Why kill the golden goose?”
“Social media trends have short shelf lives,” Chip told him with a shrug. “People on the Internet are fickle. You and Danielle started trending downward.”
“So you came here and deliberately broke us up?”
Chip chuckled. “I didn’t have to. That would have happened anyway, once you found out that Ms. Sharpe lied to you about all the B&Bs being booked. Everyone knows what a stickler for integrity you are, Hamilton.” He gave Jason a pitying tsk-tsk. “It’s too bad. You must have really liked her to swallow that line and slum it for weeks in her little shack across town.”
“It’s not a shack.” God, Chip was a snob. Jason tightened his jaw. “And Danielle couldn’t have done that to me.”
“Because you’re too smart?” Chip rolled his eyes. “Or because you don’t believe her townie influence extends to calling in favors with all her hometown hotelier buddies?”
Reluctantly, Jason remembered the strings Danielle had pulled to arrange their private sleigh ride at The Christmas House. It was possible, he knew, she’d done more than that.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You wouldn’t recognize decency if it smacked you in the face.” Jason stared Chip down. “Danielle Sharpe is decent. She’s kind and good—”
Annoyingly, Chip smirked. “Decent, huh? Interesting take, given the inventory manipulation that’s been going on at the Kismet Moosby’s. That’s why I came here. To expose it.” He gave Jason a long look. “I know you’re going to pretend you didn’t know it was happening, but by the time I’m done explaining it to the board—and showing them the videos I have to prove it—”
Didn’t he . . . show you anything?
Those were the videos Danielle had been talking about.
No wonder she’d seemed confused. Shamefaced. Concerned.
Chip or his spy must have caught Danielle manipulating inventory at Moosby’s. Could that really be true? It was conceivable, Jason knew, given the irregularities he’d seen.
All the same, he would have bet his life that Danielle had a good reason for whatever she’d been doing. He trusted her.
Even after all they’d been through and how hurt he was in that moment, he trusted her. He didn’t want to . . . but he did.
“—they’ll all agree it has to be dealt with,” Chip was saying. “It’s a long game I’ve been playing, and a clever one, too. I’ve known about Ms. Sharpe’s inventory stunts for a while now. She was good, but not that good. People who aren’t used to deceit never are. All I needed was to get you close enough to her to make sure you looked guilty as hell by association.”
“But you just gave Danielle a promotion.”
An indifferent shrug. “It’s possible she misunderstood me.”
Under his breath, Jason swore. Chip wanted to destroy him. That was no secret. Danielle had accidentally provided the means for Chip to do so—and gotten herself in his crosshairs in the process. But there was one thing that Chip hadn’t counted on.
“Nobody will believe you. It’ll be just like Bethany—”
“Ah. That’s where you’re wrong. You see, those harmless nudie photos were personal. But this is business. This is fraud.” Chip pursed his lips, looking at Jason with mock dismay. “There’s plentiful proof of this wrongdoing. Plentiful.”
Jason knew how comprehensive Chip’s spy had been while getting footage of him and Danielle and the kids for Moosby’s social media channels. Surely that spy would have been equally thorough while documenting Danielle’s potential missteps.
“So the way I see it,” Chip was saying now, “your partner in crime, Ms. Sharpe, is going down for this. Because Moosby’s will prosecute, of course.”
Full of disbelief and enmity, Jason stared at him.
“Not if I say I did it,” he heard himself say. “Alone.”
Apparently, he was still a gullible idiot. For her.
“Not if I say it was my idea,” Jason went on. “Just mine.”
Chip actually laughed. He shrugged. “If that’s the way you want it . . . who am I to stand in
the way of your resignation?” His grin broadened. “In that case, we could forget the fraud.”
Hell. Chip had done it, Jason realized. He’d forced him out. He’d made him do it to himself. And he’d never even seen it coming. Jesus, he’d underestimated this bastard.
Jason tightened his jaw. “Then let’s. It’s done. I’m gone.”
He turned away without a backward glance and strode back toward Danielle’s house.
She’d never know he’d saved her. But he would.
That would just have to be enough for him.
Chapter Nineteen
Six blocks into the Kismet Christmas Carol Crawl, Danielle began to feel that she might actually survive her heartache.
Yeah. This was working. She was moving on, lickety-split.
Already she’d successfully sung three and a half holiday songs with her kids—even if she had forgotten some lyrics and sounded a little robotic. She’d choked down a bite of Aiden’s favorite Christmas sugar cookie with only minor stomach cramps to show for her efforts. She’d chitchatted stiltedly with her caroling neighbors. She’d done her best to ooh and ah over the ornaments in a shop window, the “sick” guitars displayed in another store window with ribbons all over them, and the fat, frolicking puppies at the local shelter’s Adopt A Pet event.
There, Aiden gazed up at her with shining eyes. He sat in the middle of a litter of Labrador puppies, being climbed on and slobbered over, looking happier than she could remember.
“Can we get them, Mom? Can we? Please? Puh-leeze?”
Danielle looked at the puppies, with their wagging tails, big brown eyes, roly-poly bellies, and stumpy, clumsy legs.
“Those puppies will only break your heart, Aiden.”
Silence fell. At Gigi’s puzzled look, Danielle regrouped.
“I mean, we don’t have room for five puppies. Let’s go.”
“But I want them! I can take care of Rudolph now.” Her son gulped in a huge breath. His chin wobbled. “I can! Ask Jason!”
“Hey, where is your stupid new boyfriend, anyway?” Karlie peered around the shop in which the shelter had set up its adoption event. “Shouldn’t he have caught up to us by now?”
