Their Christmas Wish Come True

Rather than making him look poor, the old jacket and the worn jeans had a certain cachet.

She realized she was looking at a man who didn’t care—not about what he looked like, not about the cold, maybe not about anything at all.

He was exactly the kind of man her mother had always warned her about. But then that was one of the illusions she’d had to leave behind. That her mother knew best.

Her mother, who couldn’t glue her own marriage back together, her mother who had approved of Kent for Becky…Kirsten shook her head, looked away from him, troubled, looked back in time to see him nod, once, curtly. He turned and disappeared back out the door, leaving another frosty wave in his wake.

She was aware of craning her neck to see where he went, but the snow was still coming down hard, and he disappeared into it with a phantomlike quality, as if maybe he had never been in the first place.

She frowned. She wasn’t quite sure what had happened there.

“Strange encounter of the weird kind,” she said, shrugging it off and moving back to her office. She looked at her calendar. Thirty-nine days!

Way, way too much to be done, and not nearly enough time left to do it. She had not one second to spare on thinking about green eyes like those ones. What was in them? Loneliness. No. Aloneness.

Closer. The aloneness of a man who had seen hell, she decided. To feel sympathy for him, to be drawn toward the mystery in those eyes would be the most dangerous thing of all.

Not one second, she chided herself. The door opened again, and she whirled back, disgusted that she wanted it to be him.

But it wasn’t. It was Mr. Temple, the neighborhood postman, only these days he wasn’t just delivering her mail.

“Those Johansson kids are poor. They don’t expect nothin’, they don’t even hope. Imagine those poor little mites not hopin’ for anything. I told them to just pretend it could happen.”

“And?” she said.

He passed her a note, a glisten in his eyes, her most enthusiastic researcher, neighborhood spy and conspirator.

It had the boys’ address on it, she recognized it as a particularly dilapidated apartment on Fifth Street. Hans wanted a bike. Lars wanted a basketball.

“Got it,” she said, and for a moment she felt the weight of these new wishes that had been entrusted to her. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t enough money or time. Every year it seemed she would run out of both, and every year miracles happened. A few more phone calls, a few more letters, a few more radio shows. Besides, it was always a relief to get requests that could be fulfilled. She had a file—the Impossible Dreams File—of ones that could not.

“I’ve got something else for you, Kirstie.” He held it out with pleasure.

She couldn’t believe it. “Where on earth did you get this?” she asked, taking the catalog reverently from him.

“I’d tell you,” he kidded, “but then I’d have to kill you.”

It was the Little in Love Special Christmas Catalog. Only those who had reached the tier of Serious Collector of the precious figurines received it, and Kirsten was fairly sure she would never be one of those. Currently she ranked on Tier One, a Little Fan. On the tiny salary she was paid here, she could manage only one new figurine a year. Including gifts, and the odd find at a secondhand store, Kirsten now owned twelve of the hundreds of figurines that were available.

Little in Love was a collection of hand-painted porcelain bisque figurines that artist Lou Little had created in the 1950s. All the figurines were of a young couple, Harriet and Smedley, and depicted delightful scenes of their love. Little had captured something that captured hearts: innocence, wonder, delight in each other, and he never seemed to run out of material.

Trying not to appear too eager or too rude, Kirsten scurried back to her office and shut the door. She opened the catalog with tender fingers and gasped.

In an astonishing departure from tradition, the new Christmas collectibles were called A Little History and showed Harriet and Smedley in different times in history: here he was a World War I flying ace, leaning out of his plane to kiss Harriet goodbye, here he was as a pioneer building a Little house, Harriet looking on.

Then she saw it. A Knight in Shining Armor. She thought it was the most beautiful Little piece she had ever seen with Smedley, visor up, astride a magnificent white horse, leaning down to kiss Harriet’s hand.

She looked at the price, winced and mentally filed the piece—everything in this catalog—in her own impossible dreams file. Reluctantly, she put the catalog away. She would take it home with her and pore over the pictures later.

Really, the catalog should have been more than enough to sweep that other encounter right from her mind. So she was amazed, and annoyed, that it had not. Her mind kept wandering from the bookkeeping tasks. Not that engrossing, but as the Secret Santa Society’s founder and only paid employee, one of her biggest responsibilities. Rather than Smedley on horseback proving a distraction to her afternoon, it was eyes as coolly green as pond ice that she kept thinking of.

“And that is why you don’t even deserve to be a Serious Collector,” she reprimanded herself firmly.

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN Michael Brewster headed back out the door of The Secret Santa Society it was snowing harder. The office was on the mean end of Washington, most of the storefronts boarded up, shadows in the doorways. He noticed a man huddled in the doorway next to her building. Waiting for an opportunity to slip through that door and help himself?

She had paper taped over her own windows, probably to keep kids from peeking in at all her top-secret activities, but from a security point of view it would have been better if she left the windows unblocked.

Michael gave the man a look that sent him scuttling.

It was not the kind of neighborhood where a woman should be working alone—especially not with every available space in the made-over store stuffed with, well, stuff. Teddy bears, MP3 players, trikes, dolls in cellophane wrappers, including those embarrassing two that had fallen into his hands.

She was the kind of woman who made a guy feel protective. Maybe it was because her clothes had been baggy, that she had seemed tiny and fragile. Still, even with the lumpiness of the dress, she hadn’t been able to totally disguise slender curves, a lovely femininity that might make her very vulnerable at this desperate end of Washington. And it wasn’t as if she would have the physical strength to protect herself. Her wrists had been so tiny he had actually wanted to circle them between his thumb and pointer finger to see if they were as impossibly small as they looked.

And those eyes! Intensely gray, huge, fringed with the most astonishing display of natural lash he had ever seen. Her eyes had saved her from plainness.

Something about her reluctantly intrigued him—maybe the fact that she so underplayed her every asset.

What was she thinking, being alone with all that stuff in this neighborhood? Was she impossibly brave or simply stupid? Still, you had to give it to someone who was shopping around for an elf. There were probably special angels who looked after people like that.

He frowned at the thought, renegade and unwanted. He, of all people, knew there were no special angels, not for anyone. So he had obeyed Mr. Theodore. He’d come to this address thinking he was going to find someone in worse shape than him.

It obviously had not been her.

She had not been beautiful, not even pretty, really, unless he counted her eyes. He thought of them again—luminescent, brimming with a light that could almost make a man forget she was wearing a sweater just like the ones his granny used to knit. Her hair had struck him as hopelessly old-fashioned, but for some reason he’d liked it. It was just plain light brown, falling in a wave past her shoulder, no particular style.

She was one of those kind of girls he remembered only vaguely from high school—bookwormish, smart, capable…and invisible. She was not the kind who pretended fear of spiders or dropped her books coquettishly when a male of interest was in the vicinity. She did not color her hair blond or paint her lips red or have fingernails that left marks on a man’s back, her lashes would not melt when she cried.

In other words, she was not the kind of woman he knew the first thing about.

Nor did he want to, though that fleeting thought of her fingernails and his back made him shiver, which was startling. He had not reacted to a woman in a very long time. He had probably never reacted to a woman who was anything like her: understated, intelligent, pure.

Women, he reminded himself, took energy. He had none. It was that simple.

And a woman like that one manning the Secret Santa Society office would take more energy than most because despite her plainness, those multifaceted eyes made him suspect a very complicated nature. Deep. Sensitive. Intelligent. Funny.

It annoyed him that he was even thinking of her. His assignment, if he could call it that, was to find someone in worse pain than himself.

Not Ms. Secret Santa, obviously, hunting for elves and brimming with faith that her good deeds alone could protect her from this neighborhood.

But there were kids out there who needed jackets, and the first true cold snap of the year had arrived. He wondered what kind of pain it caused a parent who was not to be able to buy a jacket for a child who was cold.

Not worse pain than his own, different pain than his own.

Maybe that was why Mr. Theodore had sent him, knowing there would be something here to keep him distracted as Christmas approached. Christmas, a time of family. A time of pain for families who had nothing.

And for a guy who had nothing instead of a family.