The Christmas Gamble

by Sienna Ciles

  The Christmas Gamble

  (A Billionaire Christmas Romance)

  By

  Sienna Ciles

  www.SiennaCiles.com

  Table of Contents

  The Christmas Gamble

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  Taught

  Lost and Found

  Hard for Her - Sneak Peek

  Also by Sienna Ciles

  About The Author

  Copyright

  First Edition, December 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by Sienna Ciles

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and situations are the product of the author's imagination.

  All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written consent from the author.

  License

  This book is available exclusively on Amazon.com. If you found this book for free or from a site other than an Amazon.com country specific website it means the author was not compensated for this book and you have likely obtained this book through an unapproved distribution channel.

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  Dear Reader,

  Thank you so much for downloading and reading my book. I dedicate this book to you and hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it for you. It’s always exciting seeing my ideas and stories come to life on the pages of my books. I’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to reach out to me on Facebook by visiting my fan page.

  http://facebook.com/siennaciles

  Thank you!

  Sienna

  Chapter One

  Kayla

  My first flight on the long trek home had made it to the airport about twenty minutes early, and to my shock, I’d actually managed to get across the terminal to the gate for my connecting flight in ten minutes. Considering that it was only a couple of days out from Christmas, I must have just picked a flight time nobody wanted. But as I sat down in the gate area, I realized what the truth was: everyone was either already past security or wasn’t bothering to even go to the airport, because flights were already being delayed.

  I sat around, hoping against hope that my flight home would be the exception—or that maybe, just maybe, the airlines would get their shit together sufficiently to get things rolling properly. But as it came time to start thinking about starting the boarding process, and I didn’t even see a plane rolling up to the gate to let anyone off, I figured I was probably as stuck as everyone else.

  “Attention, passengers for flight HL319 to Raleigh…”

  I sighed. That was my flight. I was supposed to go to Raleigh and from there, one last flight to my old hometown, where my parents and sisters were already settled in for the holidays.

  “Unfortunately the National Weather Service has issued a severe cold advisory for our area…”

  I groaned.

  The rest of the announcement went predictably enough: due to the severe cold, flights were restricted from the airport, and my connecting flight—along with all the others set to depart for the next four hours—was canceled. Not just delayed, it wasn’t going to be leaving at all.

  “Shit,” I muttered, watching as a flow of people from the gate I’d been waiting at started to hurry up to the gate agent to try and get something done. I looked around and tried to think of what to do. It sounded to me like all of the flights for the next four hours were going to be canceled—so the entire passenger complement of the airport was going to be looking to rebook, or to find another flight—maybe even go to another airport, for all the good it would do them.

  My phone rang in my pocket and I took it out, checking the battery power. I’d kept it plugged into the seat console the entire flight to Omaha and hadn’t used it much in the hour or so since I’d gotten off of the plane, so it was still at ninety-nine percent. The screen flashed with the notification that Mom was calling me, and I considered letting it just roll over to voicemail—I needed to think, not talk—but I knew that Mom would just keep calling me until I answered.

  “Hey, Mom—listen, I can’t talk long,” I said as soon as the line connected.

  “Hey, Kayla! Are you getting on the plane? When are you going to be landing again?”

  I sighed. “No—no, Mom, they just announced that all the departing flights for at least the next four hours are canceled,” I told her quickly. “Some severe cold weather advisory thing.”

  “Cold weather? It’s not even snowing! That sounds like a crock of bull to me,” Mom pointed out.

  “I’m just telling you what they announced, Mom.” I was already exhausted, and even if things had gone fully to plan, I knew I’d have ended up falling asleep on the plane from Omaha. I hadn’t slept at all the night before, and the night before that I’d only gotten a few hours in between fits of anger and crying. Really, my parents’ house was the second-to-last place I wanted to be—but it was still one above being in the apartment I’d thrown my boyfriend out of less than a week before.

  “Are you sure? I know you had some event you wanted to go to…”

  “Mom, I wasn’t about to skip out on the family for Christmas,” I said, looking around and trying to figure out which area of the terminal was likely to be the least crowded. I needed to find someone who could book me something on whatever flight would bring me closest to my old hometown in the next four hours, and then I needed to figure out where to camp out for the wait.

  “I told you that you shouldn’t cut it so close to the holiday,” Mom said.

  “I know, I know,” I agreed, just to spare her the trouble of lecturing me. “I should have flown out two days ago but I needed to be in town another couple of days. It wasn’t really in my control.”

  I gathered up my stuff and started in the direction of one of the less-crowded customer service counters. It looked to me like the airline was pulling people from the front of the airport to deal with all the bullshit going down in the terminals themselves—smart precaution, since there probably wasn’t anyone who would check in for a canceled flight. “Look, let me see what they can do for me and then I’ll call you back as soon as I know.”

  “Fine, fine. Call me in like, fifteen minutes or something,” Mom said.

  I looked at the line I was about to get into and figured it would probably be more like thirty but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

  “I’ll call you as soon as I know what’s going on,” I promised. I hung up with her and settled in to wait my turn. In front of me, I had a family of eight, a lesbian couple chatting about ski plans, a French-Canadian couple talking in sounds that were suspiciously close to duck calls, and a few other people, and I thought to myself that I was at least lucky enough not to be
surrounded by boring, enraged people.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket once while I waited, and I didn’t even look. It was either one of my parents—and I didn’t want to talk to them just yet—or my ex, and I definitely didn’t want to talk to him. By the time I was at the front of the line, I had more or less resigned myself to the notion that there probably weren’t any flights that would work, at least not in the next window four hours in the future.

  “Hey, so I’m kind of out here stranded if I can’t get on a plane,” I said, trying to keep my voice as understanding and patient as possible. I’ve flown enough to know that starting out irate and bossy was not the best approach. “Aren’t there any flights that will be leaving soon, that I can transfer to get home?”

  “I’m really sorry, Ms. Matthews, but we don’t have anything for another two days,” the woman behind the desk said, and my heart sank. Two days would mean that I couldn’t get home until Christmas day—and in the meantime, I was in the middle of nowhere, outside of Omaha, with nowhere to go.

  “Are there any hotels in the airport? Is there any way the airline could accommodate me?”

  The woman’s face twisted and I knew the answer. “There’s one hotel in the airport and we were just notified like ten minutes ago that it was full up.”

  I sighed and closed my eyes. “And there’s really no way you can even get me on a plane tomorrow? To anywhere?”

  The woman shook her head. “There are possibly a few flights leaving tomorrow but they’re so full there aren’t even any standby spots left. All I can do it put you in for a ticket in two days, and put a note for an upgrade. Of course, we won’t charge you anything for the flight change.”

  I wanted to roll my eyes but I knew it wasn’t this poor woman’s fault. “Go ahead and make the booking,” I told her. I had no idea what I would do for two days—surely, I couldn’t just hang out in the hotel for that long—but I might as well go ahead and let the woman do whatever it was she could do for me.

  “I can also see about getting you a waiver for a local hotel,” the woman said helpfully.

  I nodded for her to go ahead with that, as well. At least if I was going to stay somewhere for two days, I wasn’t going to pay full price for it.

  I collected my new ticket and my little hotel waiver from the woman and left the desk, feeling deflated. I knew I should call my mom but first I needed to sit down. I’d already been traveling for six hours—between getting to the airport in my own city and waiting there, and flying to Omaha—and now I had to figure out how to get to a local hotel, and what to do with myself for two days while I waited for a flight home.

  “Who exactly did I screw over to deserve this?” I sat down a little distance away from where everyone was congregating to get their tickets changed, and sighed. A week before, I’d broken up with my boyfriend, which had already, on its own, put me in the opposite of the right mood to go see my parents who would have nothing to talk about other than my sister Megan’s wedding last year and how she and her husband were going to adopt a baby, and asking me about my own lack of a steady relationship. I’d just turned thirty the previous summer, and my parents were obsessed with my sister and me giving them grandchildren.

  I took my phone out finally and saw that it was, indeed, one of my parents who’d called me while I was in line: my father instead of my mother. Deep breath, Kayla. You can get through this. Just keep doing the next right thing. I tapped the “callback” icon and brought the phone up to my ear.

  “Hey, Dad—listen, I’m not going to be able to get into town until Christmas day,” I said, before he had time to ask anything.

  “What? What happened?”

  “I’m stranded in Omaha, because there’s a severe cold weather advisory grounding the planes and they don’t have any flights going in the direction I need for two days,” I explained.

  “Are you sure? I know you wanted to go to that thing…”

  “If I had decided to go to the competition instead of coming home, I wouldn’t be stranded in the airport right now,” I said irritably. “I need to get off the phone soon, so I can call around and find a hotel to stay at.”

  “Did the airline at least give you a hotel card?”

  “Yeah, they gave me something to help pay for the cost of a hotel while I’m stuck here,” I said. “But the whole airport is trying to get out of here and find somewhere to stay, so if I don’t think fast, I’ll be stuck where I am.”

  “Keep us updated, whatever happens,” Dad suggested.

  I told him that I would and ended the call, pulling up the GPS app on my phone to find out what was at least within a reasonable cab distance from the airport. I could risk getting something a little farther from the airport but not only would it make it more expensive to get there and then back but it would also mean that there would be a chance the hotel would turn down my waiver.

  I started on my way out of the terminal, looking up every so often as I navigated the hotel-rate finder I’d pulled up to get a room for the next two nights. It was going to be a shit show, I’d already figured out; as more and more people left the airport the hotels closest to it were filling up. The cabbies who decided to come out this way are going to make a killing tonight. I’d get in a cab, get the driver to take me to a hotel of his choice, and figure it out from there. There had to be somewhere in the area outside of Omaha that had a room available, didn’t there?

  Chapter Two

  Dean

  I had just gotten to the most exciting part of the memoir I was reading—the part I’d actually bought the book to read about—when the plane started to shake around me. I looked up from my Kindle to spot the flight attendant lurching slightly as she came to me with a carafe of hot water, to refresh the hot tea I’d made myself about an hour earlier.

  “Everything okay?”

  She nodded, pouring hot water into my mug carefully in spite of the plane shaking once again. “We’re heading into some really cold weather, heading over Nebraska, so the pilot said that a little turbulence is to be expected.”

  She left after that and I went back to my book, letting the tea steep and cool for a few moments. The private jet was really too large for just me but I’d been planning on having about five or six friends with me when I’d booked it a week before. All of my friends had backed out the day before, one after the other. I knew I shouldn’t be surprised, and I’d almost booked a reservation for a smaller jet in case something like that happened, but it still brought me down a bit.

  “Mr. Pearson?”

  I looked up from my book again to see the flight attendant coming back toward me, hands empty.

  “What’s up, Kathy?” I’d worked with her before—she was a great attendant, and always showed up to work well put-together. She’d told me once before on a long-haul flight to Japan that she liked working independently with the rental companies for private jets as an attendant: she could take the jobs she wanted, and she could write off things like salon visits for hair and nails and clothing as business expenses.

  “The pilot just informed me that we have to make an emergency landing,” Kathy said, giving me an apologetic look. “The air is too cold, and the engines are having trouble and he said something about icing, as well.”

  I frowned. “Well, what the hell does that mean? Where are we landing?”

  “He’s called into land at Omaha, on the private strip off the airport,” Kathy told me. She’d worked with me enough times to know that I wanted as many details as possible—so she’d anticipated my next few questions. “He says that the advisory is in effect for the next four hours, so we may be able to take off again but he’s not sure.”

  “Well, shit,” I muttered. “Okay, thanks for the heads up.” I put my Kindle aside and put on my seatbelt, getting ready for the landing that I was fairly sure would be a little rougher than the pilot Bill’s usual smooth-as-silk performance. I told myself that at least I wasn’t going to have to find a way to entertain my five buds on a plane fo
r four hours, or worse, potentially try and find them a place to stay. Of course, they’d insist on finding their own accommodations and paying for them but as their host, I’d feel obligated to make sure things went smoothly.

  It wasn’t going to be great anyway, heading to my house in Montauk. I had been looking forward to hanging out with some of my friends for the holidays: getting drunk, maybe playing some cards, going into the city to see a show if we felt like it, shit like that. But by myself, none of those things seemed all that great. It could be worse, I reminded myself, as I felt the plane bank uneasily toward what I assumed was the airport we would be landing at. The only Christmas I hadn’t spent alone in the previous five years had been a disaster—so I’d been hoping that a bunch of friends would keep away the loneliness.

  “Dave wanted me to confirm for you that we’re going to be landing in Omaha,” Kathy told me, making her way to the jump seat she would occupy for landing. I nodded and shut off my Kindle. Omaha was at least a major city; even if it wasn’t one of the more populous ones, there should at least be a few hotels I could go to if I had to.

  By the time the plane touched down, I’d started to think that it would be better to just go ahead and give up on the possibility of getting to Montauk that night. It was already evening, and I didn’t think the cold weather was going to let up in four hours. Bill, the pilot, confirmed for me when he came back after landing the plane. He looked a bit haggard, like always, with gray-tinged stubble already starting to come in on his cheeks.

  “Hey, I wanted to let you know that we’re probably going to be grounded for longer than four hours,” he said, sitting down in the seat opposite mine.

  “I figured as much,” I said. “It doesn’t exactly get warmer later in the night, usually.”

  Bill chuckled. “Well, all the flights out of the main airport are grounded for the night. The National Weather Service is reporting that the cold is getting worse, settling in for the evening, and might not lift during the day either.”

  I sighed. “You’ll keep me updated, right? Of course, you know you can charge a stay somewhere to me, as long as you stay close.”