her conversation. She waited for him to smile—to see if a smile would warm his gaze—but no smile was forthcoming. It was as if he could say the words that were tinged with humor—since he was obviously the man least likely to ever be mistaken for an elf—but somehow they couldn’t break through the ice that shrouded his eyes.
“Ah,” she said. “An elf. I’m in desperate need of one, but I’m afraid you’re the wrong size. No applicants over four foot eleven. Last year’s was four foot seven.”
She found herself holding her breath waiting to see if he would smile.
“But he got drunk.” He’d heard a lot of that conversation. Still no smile. Anyone who was not going to smile over a four-foot-seven drunken elf probably wasn’t going to smile about anything. It had the ridiculous effect of making her feel as if she had to make him smile, even though she was more than aware her belief system was on shaky ground, and she shouldn’t be testing its strength.
“He got very rude,” she said, ignoring the shouldn’t. “He kept asking Santa to pull his finger.” In her eagerness to make him smile, she could feel that telltale hint of heat in her chest.
As a schoolgirl, Kirsten had been tormented by blushing. In more recent years, she’d been able to head off the embarrassing tide of crimson by thinking, quickly, of something—anything—else. For some reason the fish display at O’Malley’s Market provided some of the most powerful mind-diverting pictures. Trout, eye in.
“Sounds like a good reason to trade in for bigger elves,” he said. “Those small ones can be so unpredictable.”
“We’ve never had a large elf!” Rules. She found refuge in rules.
“Sorry to hear that—it’s probably an unfair hiring practice, punishable under the equal opportunities act.”
“Actually, I think it’s impersonating an elf that is punishable by something.” For some horrible reason the word spanking came to mind and for a minute she had to close her eyes and picture freshly filleted perch. When she opened them, she said, more weakly than she intended, “Forced ingestion of Christmas cake, egg nog and Christmas carols!”
Still no smile, but just a hint of something in those mysterious eyes, the tiniest spark of sunlight flashing across green ice.
“Now who is impersonating whom?” he asked. “I heard you claim on the phone you were Santa. An obvious lie. Santa would never think of cake, egg nog and carols as a punishment. Plus, no white beard, no belly like jelly.”
She was the one who smiled then, reluctantly delighted by this spontaneous, dangerous exchange with a most mysterious stranger on a dull, gray afternoon. She smiled until the exact moment she became aware, and acutely so, that he was inspecting her!
She realized she looked about as far from the heroine of a happily ever after kind of story as anyone could look. The warehouse section of the building, behind her office, could get cold and very dusty. She was wearing a faded brown skirt, warm tights, sensible shoes, a cardigan worn at the elbows. Her hair suddenly seemed horrible, and she wished she would have let Lulu, one of the volunteers, streak the mousy-brown to blond last week when the woman had practically begged her to let her do it.
“Kirstie” Lulu had said. “You’re twenty-three. You shouldn’t look forty!”
Naturally, now she wondered if she looked forty today! That, she told herself, was what a man did.
All of a sudden, a woman who had not been on a serious date in four years on purpose was worried about her cardigan and her hair color and was thinking, wistfully, of the donation of twenty-four shades of lipstick sitting, unopened, on her desk.
All of a sudden a woman who was pragmatic to a fault was thinking if Cinderella can do it, so can I.
“I can’t help it if your vision of Santa is limited,” she said, trying valiantly not to show how flustered her own treacherous thoughts were making her. “Around here, I am Santa. Or at least the spirit of Santa. I make sure the kids in this neighborhood get Christmas gifts.”
“Even the most liberal of them must be shocked to find out you’re Santa,” he said.
He did not seem moved by her altruism. If anything, a cynical line deepened around his mouth. It annoyed Kirsten to realize that she wanted him, a complete stranger, to be impressed with her activities and accomplishments, probably because she knew her appearance had failed to impress him in any way.
“Well, they don’t find out. That’s why it’s the Secret Santa Society. We elect one of the volunteers to play Santa. The election is the highlight of our volunteer party.” Now she was giving him all kinds of dull information he couldn’t possibly want, and she was aware she felt aggravated and defensive.
Why? Because of the cynical downturn of his mouth? Because he was looking at her like she was a Goody Twoshoes?
Because she could have had her hair streaked and hadn’t?
It was time, obviously, to end this encounter.
“So, unless you’re going to sue me because I have no elf positions available, I have a lot of work to do.”
When was the last time she’d been this rattled by a guy?
That was easy. Her one and only serious relationship, her first year of college. James Moriarty. He’d pretended he liked her—no, was smitten with her—for a heady six weeks or so. He had really wanted help cheating on his math exam.
And then there was Kent, her brother-in-law—ex-brotherin-law—pretending to be Mr. Boy-Next-Door, the perfect husband. But when the whole family had most needed him to be strong, what had he been doing? Playing footsie—and much more—with his secretary.
She shivered. And that was why she was sworn off fairy tales. Men, in all their thousands of guises, were never what they wanted you to think they were. Especially fickle would-be ones like this one: big, athletic, sure of himself, drop-dead gorgeous.
Though this man in front of her did seem to be without pretense, something so real lurking in the depths of those astonishing cold, hot eyes that it threatened her heart’s armor. She tried to put her finger on it. Lost? No, not quite, though the very thought added an intriguing layer to the man who stood there dripping confidence and melting snow.
Predictably, he ignored her dismissal, “Even I’m not hardhearted enough to sue the Secret Santa Society.”
Confirming what she already could see in the cast of his face. He was world-weary in some way. Cynical.
Not the jovial grandfatherly type who usually stopped by to volunteer.
“So, no available elf position,” she said. She fully intended for it to sound like a breezy dismissal, but even she could hear the renegade regret in her voice as if she truly would like to give him a position even though a man like him would never really volunteer at an organization like this, and even though she had decided she didn’t like him. Or at least didn’t like what he was doing to her. Then she blushed.
It came without the warning heat in her chest first, no time to ward it off with visual images of fresh fillets. When she blushed, her whole face went crimson, from jawline to forehead, like a red Christmas light blinking to life.
And then he did smile, finally,
