A Very Merry Christmas

by Lori Foster, Gemma Bruce

  “It’s the holidays. They make me think about what my life is going to be like twenty years from now if I never get married and have kids. Mom will be dead and I’ll be all alone for the holidays.”

  “You’d always be included in my Christmas.”

  “It’s not the same. I’d be the pathetic spinster tagalong. It’s too depressing. The other day, I saw a commercial for The War of the Worlds. It’s a movie about Earth getting attacked by aliens, and when we’re under attack, all the families come out of their houses and hug each other while watching the battle rage. Don’t you see, Emily? If we get attacked by aliens, I won’t have any family to hug and console. You and Mom are all the way in Colorado. I’ll be all alone.”

  “Amber, if we get attacked by aliens, you’ll have bigger things to worry about than whether you’ll have family to hug while the planet is being destroyed in a blaze of alien fire. Anyway, you get asked out on dates all the time. You either turn them down flat out or only give them a few dates before you give them the ax. How are you going to find someone if you don’t give anyone a chance?”

  “If you don’t feel it, you don’t feel it.”

  “This has everything to do with your fear of commitment. This is just like you flitting from job to job.”

  I groaned. “I told you, I couldn’t get work as an actress, I got laid off from being an event planner, and the other jobs were just too mind-numbing for words. You sound just like Mom.”

  I could picture Emily clearly. She would be wearing freshly washed pajamas—actual pajamas rather than a tank top and sweats like normal people—her straight honey-brown hair would be perfectly neat in a sleek bob that cradled her face. Her nails would be short and neat and trim, and her skin would be flawless as always because a zit would never dare try to break out on her face because Emily simply didn’t tolerate disorder.

  “I’m sorry if I sound like Mom, but it would behoove you to think of her wrath if you don’t get your ass out here.”

  My stomach rumbled irritably and I felt a sharp pain. I moaned and clutched my unhappy gut.

  “Spending time with your family won’t be that bad,” Emily protested.

  “No, that’s not it. I got my yearly tin of popcorn from Aunt Lu and I devoured like half the cheese popcorn in a single sitting. You think popcorn is some light and healthy treat, but I’ve looked at the nutritional information on the bags of cheese popcorn at grocery stores, and the stuff has a jillion calories and is loaded with fat. Yet I’m utterly powerless to resist.”

  “I know. I could eat the entire thing of caramel popcorn in a single sitting. When I got the tin in the mail, I refused to open it. I’m waiting for my office holiday party and I’m going to give it away to the person I’m the secret Santa for.”

  “Wow. What willpower. If you were here, I’d gladly give you all my caramel popcorn.”

  “If you came out here for Christmas I’d give you all the cheese popcorn.”

  “No. The last thing on this earth I need is more. Thanks anyway.”

  I really did want to figure out a way to get home. I was dying to see Emily and Luke’s new place, and I always liked hanging out with Emily and Mom. Plus, now that Emily was a stepmother, I had a stepniece and step-nephew I couldn’t get enough of.

  “I assume you’re not going to Dad’s this year for Christmas, either?” Emily asked.

  Since our parents were divorced, we always had two different Christmases. I usually missed the one with Dad because he was understanding about the difficulty of me flying to California the weekend before Christmas and then flying to Colorado the next weekend. (Mom always got the actual holiday; Dad got the weekend before, mostly because he understood that the important thing was to be with your family, not the exact calendar day you did it.) Also, I’d never been particularly close to Dad. He always worked a lot when Emily and I were young and now that I was an adult, we just didn’t have much to talk about. He didn’t get my world and I didn’t get his. It wasn’t that we didn’t get along, but our relationship was formal and distantly polite.

  “Nope. Dad even offered to pay for my ticket, but I told him I can’t afford the time off from work.”

  “Then you definitely need to come out here.”

  “I know. I miss you.”

  “Oh, by the way, don’t forget to send Luke a card. It’s his birthday next week.”

  “Of course I won’t forget.” I had forgotten; thank goodness she’d reminded me.

  “What was that sound?”

  “I have some friends over.”

  “Ahh. I’ll let you go, then. I love you. But promise me you’ll be here for Christmas. I had to suffer through Thanksgiving with Mom and Mork and Luke’s mother all by myself. I can’t bear to be on my own for another holiday.”

  “I’ll do my best. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  After hanging up the phone, I rejoined my guests in the living room. I sat on the floor because Vince and Chrissie were on the couch. Brian and Scott sat on the two chairs from my microscopic kitchen table. I owned very little furniture as I couldn’t afford it and didn’t have room for it anyway. The television was propped on two cement blocks covered in a batik blanket. That was all the furniture I had except for the mattress in my coffin-sized bedroom and a small used dresser for clothes. My place was messy and cluttered, but I blamed that on the matchbox size of the place.

  “How do you two know each other?” Scott asked Chrissie and me. He sat with his legs parted with his hands on his blue-jeaned legs. He had an easy confidence about him.

  “We went to massage therapy school together,” I said.

  “So you’re a message therapist, too, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  “Do you give happy endings? Chrissie claims she doesn’t,” Scott said.

  Immediately, my jaw involuntarily clenched and I felt a wave of irritation. If you were going to make a living as a massage therapist, you had to be ready for some guys to think you were little more than a prostitute. A “happy ending” was something that apparently enough female massage therapists offered their male clients that some men came to look forward to them. I’d only had to deal with a few men with hard-ons and unrealistic expectations, but the stereotype of massage therapist as prostitute irritated me to no end.

  “No,” I snapped.

  “There’s no reason to get defensive,” Scott said. “I just think a massage is incomplete if you ignore that area. It would certainly help a guy relax.”

  “He can go relax that part of his body anytime on his own. Did you ever notice how you can’t tickle yourself and you can’t really massage yourself, but on that area of your body, things work just fine when you’re solo?” I took a defiant swig of my eggnog-rum and nearly stripped the lining of my esophagus—it was like drinking Drano.

  “It’s better if somebody else does it, though,” Scott insisted.

  I glared at him. Unfortunately, he was so good-looking, I found it difficult to maintain my righteous indignation. Plus, I realized I was allowing myself to become irritated. Nobody makes you angry; only you allow yourself to become angry. How many times had I read that in one of my eight zillion self-help books? Reading these books was all part of my plan to become a better human being who was at peace with humankind and in a perpetual Zen state of mind and all that kind of shit.

  As I looked at Scott and tried to calm myself, I realized he looked familiar.

  “Scott, have you and I met before?”

  “Scott was in that Verizon commercial,” Chrissie said. “Do you remember it? It was the one where…”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember you! I know the commercial you’re talking about,” I said excitedly.

  Scott’s face flushed. “The residuals helped me pay my rent for the last few years.”

  “That’s so cool. I feel honored to have a semifamous actor in my apartment.”

  He shrugged. “It’s been a while since I’ve gotten any work.”

  “Still,
it’s great that you got the part. I tried to be an actress and failed miserably. You must be so proud.”

  “He’s being modest,” Chrissie insisted. “He was in a couple movies, too. Have you ever heard of Red Rose?”

  “Uh, no. Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It was in the theater for like, ten minutes.” He shrugged.

  “You were in a movie. That’s awesome,” I said, genuinely impressed.

  I was distracted by Chrissie’s shriek as Vince pulled her onto his lap and thrust his tongue so far down her throat he could probably taste whatever she’d had for dinner swirling around in her stomach.

  This was Chrissie: making out while I was stuck staring at two strange men and feeling decidedly awkward. I glanced at Scott again. Scott was so comfortable in his skin, so confident. I really wanted not to like him. He had that sort of alpha-male arrogance about him that successful businessmen, college athletes, and men who have always had power seemed to have. But I found that Scott’s sureness of himself was strangely intoxicating.

  “Ah, so Brian, what do you do?” I asked, trying to ignore the porno audition taking place on my couch.

  “This and that.”

  I cleared my throat. This was going to be harder than I thought. “Uh-huh. Are you from New York originally?”

  “No.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “A while.”

  I nodded, then stood. “Why don’t I get us some more drinks?”

  “I’ll help.” Scott followed me to the kitchen. “I hope I didn’t offend you with my comment. I was just kidding.”

  “No, not at all.” I became very busy mixing the rum and eggnog.

  “That’s a really cool necklace.” Scott gently caressed my pendant; the pads of his fingers grazed my collarbone. The heat from his touch shot through my body; I shivered involuntarily.

  “It’s a goddess symbol.”

  “Are you a goddess worshipper or something?”

  “Not really, not exactly anyway, no, uh-uh.” My tongue was stuck on some channel of stupidity. “I just believe there is a power that women have, and when I’m going through tough times, I can tap into that energy. Does that sound New Agey and weird?”

  “No. I get that. I believe that everything gives off energy. You know, vibrations that can be either negative or positive. It’s like how electrons bounce from person to person, from this counter to you, from the counter to the glass. If you give off positive energy, you attract it.”

  “Doesn’t positive attract negative?”

  “Maybe, but I like my way better.”

  I smiled. “I do, too.” I was slightly taken aback to hear his theory. He was classically handsome, and I tended to think that guys who were that attractive didn’t think about much more than getting drunk and laid. Plus, I liked his idea. It was the what-goes-around-comes-around philosophy, and I personally believed that if you did good things, good things would happen to you.

  He returned my smile. I nearly whimpered with longing.

  When we returned to the others, Chrissie finally came out of her lip-lock with Vince. “You know what this party needs? Music!” she said.

  I surveyed my CDs. In recent years, most of what I’d added to my music collection were compilations of chanting by yogi masters and meditation gurus. All I can say is thank goodness I had crappy taste in music during my misspent youth (which, granted, was only a few years ago), and I had some suitably pop-sounding party-mix CDs.

  The next few hours involved a great deal more rum and conversation on topics I suspect were less than high-brow.

  When I woke in the morning, I found myself on the floor in the living room with carpet lint up my nose. Brian was curled up naked on my couch, and a pair of red boxer shorts with smiling reindeer was draped over my lamp.

  Why oh why was Brian naked? I bolted upright and did a quick status check—I appeared to have all my clothes on. Of course, clothes could always be put back on, so that didn’t necessarily mean I was safe. Please, please tell me I didn’t sleep with Brian the Monosyllabic Wonderboy.

  Further reconnaissance revealed Chrissie and Vince in various states of undress on my bed, as if my bedroom karma wasn’t—pardon the expression—already screwed enough.

  Scott, I noticed, was nowhere to be found.

  I looked around for telltale condom shrapnel or worse, a used condom lying like a smooshed sea snail in a sad and gooey heap. There was no sign of condom detritus, which meant either I was in the clear or in worse trouble than I thought.

  “Chrissie!” I hissed in a whisper. “Chrissie!”

  She lifted her head and cracked open one eyelid about a nanometer. “Huh?”

  I waved frantically to indicate I wanted her to come over to me. Wrapping the sheet around her, she staggered over. Her hair looked like Medusa’s might have if Medusa had just been shocked by a bolt of lightning.

  “Why is there a naked man on my couch?”

  Chrissie’s gaze followed the direction my finger was urgently pointing.

  “Brian? Brian’s just one of those guys who goes a little crazy once you get a few drinks in him. He started singing ‘Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ and doing a striptease.”

  “I didn’t mess around with him, did I?”

  “He passed out not long after the striptease.”

  “Thank God.”

  Chrissie woke up the guys and told them it was time to get going. After my houseguests sheepishly dressed and departed, I straightened up a little.

  If only the disaster that was my checking account could be cleaned up so quickly. I was afraid, however, that it wasn’t going to be quite that easy.

  All mystery author Maggie Kelly wants for Christmas is to snuggle under the mistletoe with her fictional Regency Era creation who’s miraculously come to life. Too bad someone has something a bit more sinister in mind for Maggie this holiday season…

  She hasn’t always been nice…

  Maggie is still marveling at the fact that the drop-dead gorgeous Regency hero of her novels—Alexander Blake, the Viscount Saint Just—has miraculously come to life and is shacking up in her twenty-first-century apartment. Unfortunately, the handsome rake is demanding more than a few heart-melting kisses under the mistletoe. For one thing, he’s hell-bent on being her protector, even though Maggie’s made it quite clear she’s no helpless damsel in distress. For another, he’s made himself quite comfortable—in her bed. (Not that she’s complaining…)

  But she’s definitely never been this naughty…

  What is troubling Maggie, though, is that ever since Alex turned up, she’s developed this nasty habit of tripping over dead bodies. And when she receives an overnight package with a not-so-merry present, it’s obvious she’s become the next victim to be crossed off some homicidal maniac’s list. At least Alex is finally feeling useful. Now if only he’d stop talking about making her his bride and continuing the family name…

  “Maggie’s wit and Saint Just’s antics will raise the

  holiday spirits of Michaels’s fans.”

  Publishers Weekly

  Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek at

  Kasey Michaels’s

  HIGH HEELS AND HOLIDAYS

  now on sale at bookstores everywhere!

  Saint Just stood just inside the small wire cage at the very back of the basement of the Manhattan condo building, a scented handkerchief to his nostrils as he looked at the tightly tied green plastic garbage bag lying on the cement floor.

  “Grateful as I am, Socks, that you are cognizant of the strictures as laid down by all of the many crime-scene investigation programs on television, I do believe you might have safely disposed of the body. Unless, of course,” he added facetiously, turning to his friend Argyle Jackson, doorman of said condo building, “it was your thought that I might wish to perform an autopsy?”

  Socks held his hands cupped over his nose and mouth as he shuffled in place, clearly wishing himself anywhere
but where he was at the moment. “Hey, Alex, when I called you in England you told me to not touch anything. I’d already opened the box, so I just tossed everything in that bag and brought it down here until you got home. You never said to throw away the body.”

  “Were there identifying marks with which we could trace the thing, Socks? Scars? Distinctive tattoos? A wooden leg, perhaps?”

  Socks shook his head. “Okay, okay, I get the point, Alex. It was a rat. Just like every other rat in Manhattan, except that this one was dead.”

  “Then you could have safely disposed of the thing, and I apologize most profusely for not being more explicit. Now, before we open it, could you tell me what else is in the bag? And remind me, please, of the particulars of the delivery of the package. I was rather involved with other matters when last we spoke.”

  “You really want to do this now?” Socks asked, taking another step backward. “You just got home from the airport a couple of minutes ago. Some trip, too, from what Sterling told me before he headed upstairs to see Henry. Isn’t that something, Alex? Give one of them a white fur coat and he’s a pet, like Henry. Make another one ugly and he’s just another damn rat. Would that be discrimination, you think? Sterling said you solved more murders while you were in England, huh? You sure have all the luck.”

  “We will discuss all of that later, Socks, if you don’t mind, as I’m anxious to begin my investigation. According to you, there has been a threat on Maggie’s life. I don’t believe there is anything to be gained by delay, do you? Besides, Maggie is busy upstairs, undoubtedly cudgeling her brain for reasons to put off unpacking for at least a week, and won’t notice that I’m gone.”

  “Okay, but do I have to be here?”

  “To tell me what I’ve just asked you to tell me, yes, you do,” Saint Just said, manfully lowering the handkerchief, because he’d just remembered reading that allowing your olfactory senses to be inundated by the sickening smell of decomposing flesh was the best way to shut down those senses, rendering himself at least temporarily immune to the stench. Of course, the shutting down part took several minutes, and he only hoped the rather pitiful chicken salad sandwich he’d had on the plane had already been fully digested.